Internationalization of user data

Question

Hi

I have a client that wants to store data in a MySQL database with multiple languages (English, French etc) and be able to retrieve the data (in the same specified language). ie: we have an English description of a product (varchar), which we intend to rewrite in French, and then on the server side find the description in the locale that we require.

I thought of wrapping the data in XML with language tags and then parsing the data?

What is the best way to cater for multiple languages from a user data perspective? Is there a framework out there?

J

Answer 1

I don't know exactly, does such mechanism exist, but if it isn't, I'd store data in format encoding$encoded_text like UTF-8$#####.

Answer 2

This is what ResourceBundle is meant for; most people use the Properties-based implementation, but you could easily write an implementation backed by a database.

Answer 3

I think that you could fix the problem with a Master - Detail table model:

TABLE Product 
--------------------
ID
ID_MANUFACTURER   
EAN13    
WHATEVER

TABLE Product_I18n
---------------------
ID_PRODUCT
ID_LOCALE
DESC

When you have to access data in a certain Locale, you have to pass the Locale String to the query, but you don't need to fight against a localized XML structure...