Clarion from SoftVelocity provides a lot of capabilities to programmers, but third party addons can make many tasks easier. In fact, the availability of great third party tools is one reason why Clarion is my tool of choice for developing database applications. Since the Internet can make your software visible to a global customer base, you may get requests from customers - or potential customers - for the ability to translate your software to their language. In addition, you may have some customers who want to use different field labels than what you have compiled into your application. The solution is runtime translation. There are some third party tools available to Clarion Developers that make this easier. However, there is also a template set that is available for "free" that can also help you to incorporate runtime translation in your apps. The ABC Templates are available at: http://www.authord.com/Clarion/ Visit that link and you will find the latest download as well as a description of the great functionalities provided - for free!
The following screen shots may be helpful if you decide to try including runtime translation in your Clarion apps. Assuming you have downloaded the templates:
The first thing you will want to do is import the .txa file used be the ABC Free template. So choose, File, Import Text..
and browse to wherever you have saved the file vsa_ldtr.txa
Next, be sure that on the Global Properties for your application, you have a check in the box to Enable Run-time Translation.
You will also want to add a Global Data field entry for the file name to be used in translation, GLO:DosFileName.
You will then want to insert the global extension. The ABC Free Templates section is quite long (they have provided a wealth of functionality to add to your Clarion apps for a price that can't be beat - free!) so you will have to search the group below..
The extension you want to look for is shown below..
When you have added the extension you can then set the properties as I have below:
I decided to call my original language settings original.txt and the translated text file changed.txt. I clicked the box to Use Translator.ExtractText and for that file name I chose extract.txt
After compiling the application and running it a bit the extract.txt file should be created in your application directory and should start off looking something like the example below:
I now edit this file by deleting the first two lines entirely. I then do a search and replace in Notepad.exe by searching for PSTRING(' and replacing with, well, nothing.
I then do a search and replace for ') and replace with nothing.
I then have a file with a lot of double spaced lines so I edit the file again, deleting the empty lines. I save the file with the name original.txt and save it again with the file named changed.txt - which is the file I will edit for the new translation.
When your application is run the changed.txt file is used. If there are no differences between that file and the original.txt file your application will run just as you designed it. However, if you have changes in the changed.txt file this will show up as replacement text throughout your application.
I then go to Google.com to use their translate facility and find the translation for whatever language I want to use. I search and replace in notepad again, this time using my changed.txt file. When finished, I run the application and the new text is used throughout. It really takes longer to describe this process. Once you have done it a time to two it is really pretty easy to do.
Thanks Vince!
