Kelly, I think you have conflicting requirements. You can't rely on strings outside the database for I18N support and then rely on them for sorting within the database. I think this leaves you with two options:
1. Create a 2nd table which contains your text messages. Join to this table and pull of the correct column which represents the language you want (en, de, etc.) 2. Do the sorting in your middle tier. Thanks, Paul -----Original Message----- From: Kelly Harward [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2005 1:32 PM To: user@struts.apache.org Subject: Problem with localization and database sorting This isn't necessarily a Struts-specific question, but I'm hoping I can get some good ideas from this group. I'm working on a Struts-based web app that has various i18n requirements. Struts handles the localization quite well and for the most part makes the need to support a new language pretty trivial. However, I've come up against a problem that I'm sure is not unique to this Struts app and hoping to hear how others have handled this issue. Like many web apps, we display a lot of tabular data that is stored in an RDBMS. We have the requirement to allow users to sort columns by clicking on the column header (which munges the SORT BY clause on the underlying SQL query and relegates the actual task of sorting the data to the database). In many instances, we have various properties that are stored in the database using arbitrary tokens (think of an event log where the notion of event type is represented in the database as an integer). When rendering the result set obtained by querying the database, we typically apply a renderer to decorate those columns where the data is represented using the arbitrary token (in the event log example, the renderer for the event type column might be responsible for transforming the integer "2" into the more user-friendly string "Warning"). Struts makes it pretty easy for us to provide a mapping between arbitrary tokens (stored in the database) and localized strings (displayed to users). We can support additional languages very easily simply by providing a new mapping between the various tokens and their corresponding string representations in the language we are required to support. However, since we are relying on the database to do the sorting for us, when we allow users to sort on a column that is represented in the database by some token the database is going to sort on the token which is not necessarily the natural ordering for the string values the users are seeing (they would expect the natural order to be alphabetical ordering of the translated strings we are displaying to them). Obviously we could attempt to correlate the natural ordering of the tokens to the desired ordering of their string representations, but this breaks down as soon as you attempt to add support for a second language. Anyone ever come across this dilemma and have any ideas on how to solve it? Thanks in advance, -Kelly --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Notice: This e-mail message, together with any attachments, contains information of Merck & Co., Inc. (One Merck Drive, Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, USA 08889), and/or its affiliates (which may be known outside the United States as Merck Frosst, Merck Sharp & Dohme or MSD and in Japan, as Banyu) that may be confidential, proprietary copyrighted and/or legally privileged. It is intended solely for the use of the individual or entity named on this message. If you are not the intended recipient, and have received this message in error, please notify us immediately by reply e-mail and then delete it from your system. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
