Forum OpenACS Development: Re: named objects

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13: Re: named objects (response to 12)
Posted by Dirk Gomez on

How do you intend to support I18N then? Not only for categorization, but also for *every* other package in the system?

In a document called "Best Practices for Globalization using the Oracle 9i Internet Application Server" to which I was pointed at by Mohan, Oracle suggests this:


-- fallback language is English which is abbreviated as 'US'.
CREATE VIEW default_message_view 
  AS SELECT msgid, message 
  FROM messages 
  WHERE langid = 'US'; 
/

-- create view for services, with fall-back mechanism
CREATE VIEW messages_view AS
SELECT d.msgid,
  CASE WHEN t.message IS NOT NULL 
    THEN t.message 
    ELSE d.message 
  END AS message
FROM default_view d,
  translation t
WHERE t.msgid (+) = d.msgid AND
t.langid (+) = sys_context('USERENV', 'LANG');

SELECT message FROM message_view where msgid = 'hello';

Looks kinda slick: If you don't find a translation with the first index lookup, you need a second one. Shouldn't be that much of a performance impediment: If an average index lookup takes 5 I/O accesses (that's already for a huge table), you add a maximum of 10 I/Os per row.

It *clearly* is much more expensive than returning the name from a row that Oracle has touched anyway (access costs amount to zero there).

The current I18N solution sacrifices performance for tight coupling of related objects. Is it good? I dunno. Is lose coupling - every translated object gets its own row in acs_objects - better. I dunno.