ExtraView has been designed to work in a global setting. The following attributes should be understood when looking at ExtraView working over multiple countries and languages:

  • Locales – Locales identify specific languages and geographic regions.  Within ExtraView you create an entry for each of the locales you require.  A locale is defined as a combination of the Language and the Region.  For example, here are some definitions:
    Language Language Code Region Region Code
    English en Great Britain GB
    English en United States US
    Japanese ja Japan JP
    French fr Fance FR
    French fr Canada CA

    For each locale you create, ExtraView will maintain a set of information for the messages to display, the numeric formats to use when displaying data, date formats and sort orders.  The two-letter language codes are defined within an ISO standard (ISO 3166-1).  The two-letter region codes extend the language code to indicate the geographic region.  One language may have many regions.  For example, there are approximately 20 Spanish speaking countries or regions.

    Each user belongs to a single locale, set within their Account Administration screen. For example, you may have users in Japan, Great Britain and Germany.  Each user will see date formats in their own locale, with no resulting confusion because of the differing and conflicting date formats in use over the world. If Extraview has been localized for a specific locale, then a user who sets that locale will see the localized messages for that locale. In this way different users in different countries can all see and use ExtraView within their own language.  Note that the language translations must be provided for each region.  If there is no language translation for any message or title, ExtraView will display the value in the DEFAULT_LANGUAGE, usually English

  • Language Translation – Each installation has a default language, defined in the behavior setting DEFAULT_LANGUAGE.  Usually, this is en for English.  For each locale that is defined, the administrator can define an alternative to each and every system message and to each and every metadata list value entered when configuring the system.  If a user is working within a locale, and no translation has been created for a specific message, ExtraView will display the message using the DEFAULT_LANGUAGE.
  • Date Formats – For each locale, ExtraView will display date formats with the appropriate local format.  For example, if the date is January 10, 2015 and you have selected a SHORT date format, the date will be displayed as 01/10/15 if the locale is en-US and displayed as 10/01/15 if the locale is en-GB
  • Numeric Formats – Numbers will be displayed according to the conventions of the locale set for the user.  For example, the number 123,456.789 in the en-US locale will be displayed as 123.456,789 in the de-DE German locale
  • Sort Order – Given the different alphabets for different locales, ExtraView will sort lists and results according to the rules of the locale
  • Time zones – There is support for every time zone around the world. Each user can select the time zone within which he is working. ExtraView will account for time zones in all its calculations. For example, if you have two users in different time zones, and one updates an issue in the Pacific Time zone, and the other views the issue in the European Central time zone, the user in the European Central time zone will see the issue expressed in their time zone. There is support for two types of date fields; fields with a display type of date will always be corrected as just mentioned. There are also day fields where no correction is made for time. This can be used for events such as a birth date where you never want to correct for time zone
  • Automatic translation of data – It is possible to configure different text area fields where a field in one language within one field may automatically be translated to a different language in a different field. This uses Google’s web service API to perform the translation

As far as possible, ExtraView relies on foundation technology such as the database and the Java language to provide many of these features.  For further information on this topic, please consider visiting these reference sources: