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Try googling you will get sample projects on library management system, see how far it meets requirement and then enhance it, Since you are student there is nothing much you can do about it
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Hi all,
again I wan't to come up with a rather theoretical question. This time regarding localization of a winforms project.
I read some articles on the topic and checked whats available on the market but I am not really satisfied with what I have found.
My project consists of a main-frame app that loads plugins (mainly Forms), displays them and handles the communication of the plugins.
I found several tools that handle resource file localization.
While I think that this will work in normal winform apps I am pretty sure that this will result in duplicate translations (Imagine a Save-Button label - this will be needed in nearly every plugin so the developer of a plugin will have to deal with this in the plugin on his/her own).
I also found database related solutions that I like a little better than the resource file solution. Unfortunately those solutions look pretty "fat" and will maybe trouble me with their licences.
So I thought about it a little while and here is what I came up with:
I thought about having a central class that should handle the translations for me globally. The corresponding DLL will be given to the plugin developers too, so they can implement it within their plugins.
I want to send every string through a static function that accepts the string and reads the UICulture in the background. It should then check if the string is already in the database, translates and returns if so, or creates "placeholder entries" and retruns the default value (the passed string).
The Placeholder entries can then be read by a little app that visualizes the missing translations, allowing a transslator to go through them and translate whats missing.
This way the "save" translation will not be duplicated and administered in a single place.
Additionally the mainFrame can extend it's languages without having to deal with the plugin resources.
The drawback for now is that the plugin developer will not be able (so far) to submit his/her translations together with the plugin, but I do not think that this is really necessary. I also haven't thought heavily about images, but there will be a way.
So what do you think? Is this a screwed up idea?
What tools do you use for such requirements?
Is it even necessary to think about duplicate translations?
I am looking foreward to hear your thoughts about this, any input is kindly appreciated
cheers and have a great day
Andy
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Thanks for moving this to the appropriate forum. 
Cheers!
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine."
Ross Callon, The Twelve Networking Truths, RFC1925
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You are wellcome... thanks for pointing it out 
cheers from Munich
Andy
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hoernchenmeister wrote:
So what do you think? Is this a screwed up idea?
Yes. That's the kind of idea that gave us Dutch and German exception-messages in .NET. It means that the context will be determined during translation, not during design - and that might give some very strange effects.
hoernchenmeister wrote: Is it even necessary to think about duplicate translations?
I don't see the problem with the redundancy. Is it consuming a lot of space that it's an issue here? Take in account that I (as a Dutch user) probably wouldn't be interested in having the Arabic language-pack on my harddisk.
The only "problem" is that the word "Save" has to be translated twice, as you suggest. Once in Application A, once in Application B. Perhaps you could share those resources over both projects.
hoernchenmeister wrote: What tools do you use for such requirements?
Did this twice; once using my own classes, indeed with a string-lookup, similar like you would HtmlEncode and decode. Once using the VS-IDE[^], which was easier than I expected.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
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Thanks a lot for your honest contribution, it is very much appreciated.
I understand your points so far and will take them into concern.
The main reason for thinking about this problem in the first place is the plugin-mechanism. The MainFrame does not know what languages it should support, neither does the developer of the plugin...
Normally a bunch of dlls is copied into the appropriate directory to make the MainFrame pick it up. So I thought that translation should be up to the MainFrame which leads me into the belive that a custom, database related tool should do the job.
So if I have five plugins all using a save button, I would need 5 translations for exactly the same thing... thas where my concern about dulicate translations came into play...
Also thanks a lot for mentioning the VS-IDE approach, I'll go digg into this 
cheers
Andy
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hoernchenmeister wrote: The MainFrame does not know what languages it should support, neither does the developer of the plugin...
They don't need to know. Windows knows what culture the user is using, and both can "ask" Windows.
hoernchenmeister wrote: So if I have five plugins all using a save button, I would need 5 translations for exactly the same thing...
Yes/no.
You could opt to put the shared resources in an external library, and share that among the projects. That way you'd need to localize the resources only once. Like putting the "OK" and "Cancel" button in their own assembly, and reference that from multiple forms/projects.
You're welcome, and good luck
Bastard Programmer from Hell
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Hi Eddy Vluggen,
thanks a lot for the clarification.
There is just one thing that I maybe missexplained:
Eddy Vluggen wrote: They don't need to know. Windows knows what culture the user is using, and both
can "ask" Windows.
This is totally correct, but I was actually referring to the language the customer wants the application to run with.
I do not know wether they want a dutch, german, english or whatever language, neither does the plugin developer know, so it has to be possible to adjust it after deployment.
Anyway, this doen't make an actual difference
Eddy Vluggen wrote: You could opt to put the shared resources in an external library, and share that
among the projects. That way you'd need to localize the resources only once.
I like this idea and honestly I already use such an approach for sharing image resources over multiple projects.
Thanks Eddy for sharing your ideas/knowledge, I appreciate this very much!!!
Have a great day and best regards
Andy
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You're welcome
Bastard Programmer from Hell
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I did the localization for our applications some 2 years ago. Texts shown on forms/lables/buttons were the minor point. We do have far more messages shown in MessageBoxes (or other strings changed at runtime), and it was a long work to find them all in the source code.
I created my own tools for reading the source code line by line, looking for literal strings, display them, manually decide whether the string has to be localized or not (e.g. our logging is not localized - that would be too much extra work), and replace it with an appropriate call to the ResourceManager and adding the string to the appropriate resource file.
And yes, the OK button's text shows up perhaps a hundred times in the resource files...
If I remember correctly, with (non-managed) C++ it was possible to use Windows resources for such common texts like "OK" "Cancel" "File" "Edit" etc. But I do not know how to do that with .Net.
By the way, I added an entry to the app.config file such that the user can decide to use a different locale than Windows. Here in Germany, some of our customers use an English Windows on their servers, and with that little trick our applications can be set to German.
And another point to consider: a new thread inherits the language from Windows, not from the process which started the thread. The language must be set here again.
The .Net resource files can be used by specialized translation offices. Their tools discover such multiple entries like the "OK". Their prices here in Germany are typically about 1 Euro per entry for most Western languages.
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Hi Bernhard,
thanks a lot for sharing your experiences., it was very helpful.
Good you mentioned the threadding issue, that completely fell under the table
In my application the language is set when logging in by selecting the required language. The language is then stored as readonly in a static class, pretty much the same as using a config file.
I also haven't heared about the translation offices you have mentioned. While I am pretty sure our management will use internal resources for translating this is still a good thing to know
Thanks a lot and have a great day,
Viele Grüße aus München
Andy
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Lately I have begun to question how far an application should go to allow users to address possible errors? This may be answering my own question but it dawned on me while writing that it comes down to, at what point does the error checking and correction begin to affect application build costs and performance.
What do others think?
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Troy.compdr wrote: how far an application should go to allow users to address possible errors?
Depends on what the application does.
Troy.compdr wrote: at what point does the error checking and correction begin to affect
application build costs and performance.
I have never seen a user (human) application where validation impacted performance. At least not where it wasn't traced to some basic misuse of something (perhaps overuse and incorrect use of regexes.)
Presumably by "build costs" you mean development cost. Since most places don't rigorously track costs I doubt there is an objective answer to that. However I have seen complex error scenarios be deferred because they would take too much development time. Not sure that the extreme cases matter anyways because they often reflect possible rather than likely user errors.
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In my experience input validation and logging reduce development time and cost, and maintenance time and cost. Error correction, retries, best guesses, and the like, are tricky ones; when provided, make sure you have an easy way to disable them, otherwise your basic (or unit) testing may become very cumbersome.
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See my thoughts regarding the issue here[^]
"You get that on the big jobs."
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What is your way of dealing with a composition in a class?
Will you force the user to pass the required values to the contained objects?
Or you'll let the user set the contained object anytime later and check for it's validity everywhere?
For example,
class Rocket
{
Booster b1;
Rocket(Boostertype bt, BoosterPower bp)
{
b1 = new Booster(bt,bp);
}
Launch()
{
b1.fire();
}
}
Or it could be done this way
class Rocket
{
Booster b1;
Rocket()
{
}
initBooster(Boostertype bt, BoosterPower bp)
{
b1 = new Booster(bt,bp);
}
Launch()
{
if(null!=b1)
{
if(b1.bp >100)
{
}
}
}
}
My preferred way is to enforce Rocket's constructor with params required for booster as well.
Unless we pass a sensible value for the booster, rocket creation will fail.
But my mate here seem to differ with my opinion. He doesn't want Rocket's creation to be disturbed by booster constructors parameters.
Instead, when a Launch() is called , it should throw an exception saying Booster is not initialized/configured.
Which one would you prefer?
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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It depends on how you want to interact with the composite member.
I will often use an interface for the composite member that forces certain behavior on the parent.
To continue with your example. Can a rocket exist without the booster? Yes, then it does not belong in the constructor; no, then it must be initialised.
I would have:
interface BoosterInterface {
Booster getBooster();
Boostertype getBoosterType();
Boostertype getBoosterPower();
void initBooster(Boostertype bt, BoosterPower bp);
void setBooster(Booster bl);
void setBoosterType(Boostertype bt);
void setBoosterPower(BoosterPower bp);
}
class Rocket
impliments BoosterInterface {
}
Having the interface means that you can of course force behaviour to the containing class.
My two pennies worth.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done.
Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H
OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre
I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer
Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett
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Makes sense. 
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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It's an interesting one to say the least. One of the principals of OO development is that you shouldn't return an object out of a constructor that requires further configuration to be useful*. In other words, you shouldn't need to set additional properties before the class is useful. In this particular case, the fact that you can get to the Launch code without setting it, and the first point that you notice that there's a failure is at this point would indicate that the Booster should have been applied earlier on.
*Now, looking at your sample, it would seem that what you are looking at here is an object that would typically be composed using Dependency Injection, so it would be reasonable to assume that the DI code would actually compose your object for you. This would mean that you would be exposing a dependency that your code was reliant on - and this is where it gets slightly murkier. If you favour the wide constructor approach to composition, then every time you need to add an extra dependency to your class, you have to add it to your constructor, and add a backing field for that type. You may prefer the dependency property (I'm not using this in the WPF way here) approach, which means that you would expose a property for it - and this could be an auto property so you wouldn't need to add the field yourself as the compiler takes care of this for you behind the scenes.
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Using the analogy of the rocket, you can still perform a lot of actions - giro tests, etc - without a booster. The booster is an added item, not necessarily an intrinsic part. If the rocket must have a booster, then I agree it must be a part of the constructor to ensure its presence.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done.
Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H
OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre
I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer
Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett
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Nagy Vilmos wrote: If the rocket must have a booster, then I agree it must be a part of the
constructor to ensure its presence.
And that's the rub. What constitues a valid instance of the class? In the admittedly contrived example given, the only operation that could be performed was a Launch, so the booster is an intrinsic part of this particular example.
Now, if this class were one I was designing, I would take a slightly different approach if this was a full lifecycle of a rocket. This particular rocket implementation is tightly coupled to a single booster. What happens if I want a rocket with more than one booster? Or I want to use one that's based on the ACME Fusion Drive 3000 elastic band? To that end, I'd consider that a design like this might be better:
public class Rocket
{
public Rocket()
{
}
public void PreLaunchTests()
{
OnPreLaunchTests();
}
public void Launch()
{
}
protected virtual void OnPreLaunchTests()
{
}
protected virtual void OnLaunch()
{
}
}
public class SingleBoosterRocket : Rocket
{
public List<IBooster> Boosters { get; private set; }
public SingleBoosterRocket()
{
Boosters = new List<IBooster>();
}
public void AddBooster(IBooster booster)
{
Boosters.Add(booster);
}
protected override void OnPreLaunchTests()
{
}
protected override void OnLaunch()
{
if (Boosters.Count == 0)
throw new NotEnoughBoostersException();
}
}
public class DualBoosterRocket : SingleBoosterRocket
{
public DualBoosterRocket() : base()
{
}
protected override void OnPreLaunchTests()
{
}
protected override void OnLaunch()
{
if (Boosters.Count < 2)
throw new NotEnoughBoostersException();
}
}Again, this is a completely fabricated design, but this has the advantage of being more flexible. Ultimately, the design should be based on the real requirements, which is why I have steered well clear of saying that one approach is better than another in all cases. BTW - in case you're wondering, the actual composition in this sample has been moved to the containing object, rather than the actual rocket implementation, as that piece of code would be the one that decided what the composition entailed. The rules for the rocket have been encapsulated in a simple classes that have a single responsibility.
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Thanks for the example Pete
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy.
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As Pete says, a constructor should always return a valid object, that is, you should be able to use it in normal situations. So the answer to the question depends on whether a Rocket can be useful without a Booster. In your simplistic example, where it has one method and that method throws an exception if it isn't set, it clearly can't, and therefore the Booster should be assigned in the constructor (and, if applicable, a null check applied there).
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