Preparations for multilingual applications

Please ensure that you are familiar with the concepts described in the Language Overview before preparing your multilingual applications.

As described in the Language Overview you need a separate DLL for each language you want your application to support. You also need a library to contain the language identifier DEFINEs that are used by the DLLs and your application.

Language identifier library
The library should contain a DEFINE called VOPP_LANGUAGE_LASTID so that VOPP can easily determine the last value used as a string identifier, e.g.:

DEFINE VOPP_LANGUAGE_LASTID := 1000

This library will be automatically updated with new string identifiers each time you use Language Assistant to put a new string in the string tables in the DLLs.

An "empty" language identifier library is provided in the VOPP3 directory (Language Library.AEF). You can rename this library to suit your own naming standards after you import it.

Language DLLs
Each language DLL needs to contain a string table like this:

RESOURCE VOPP_Language STRINGTABLE
BEGIN
END

A "empty" language DLL, containing a string table as shown above, is provided in the VOPP3 directory (Language DLL.AEF). You can import Language DLL.AEF and then rename it as you require for your application. Don't forget to change both the name in the repository and the name of the DLL that is created. Do this once for each language you want your application to support (VOPP supports up to 4 language DLLs).

Note: if you try to compile the empty string table you will see errors. There should be at least one string in the table before it will compile successfully.

One more thing...
Make sure your application and each of the language DLLs have the language identifier library as one of the libraries listed in their properties. The language DLLs should not be listed in the properties of the application.

Example
This example show how to prepare a mulitlingual version of the Standard MDI application:

1. Import Language Library.AEF
2. Rename it to Standard MDI Language Lib.
3. Optionally change the value of VOPP_LANGUAGE_LASTID.

4. Import Language DLL.AEF
5. Rename it to Standard MDI EN. This will be the English DLL
6. Change the properties so it will create StdMDIEN.DLL

7. Import Language DLL.AEF
8. Rename it to Standard MDI DE. This will be the German DLL.
9. Change the properties so it will create StdMDIDE.DLL

10. Create a Standard MDI application from the VO application gallery (new Application from the menu).
11. Go to the library section of the properties of the Standard MDI app, Standard MDI EN, and Standard MDI DE and ensure that Standard MDI Language Lib is in the library list of each one.