[Chameleon] language handling - xml??

[Paul Spencer]

Liz, there are several things relating to you answer:

* dbf does have a limit of around 255 characters per field unless memos 
are supported (which they aren't in php's implementation of dbf).

* the help for each widget is not in dbf files.  The dbf files only 
store the stuff for the UI, mostly error messages and labels for stuff 
in dialog boxes.

* Chameleon help system has been changed to use a much more complete XML 
document for each widget, one for each language.  The HelpWidget has 
been changed to EmbeddedHelp and it basically pulls out the contents of 
the <OnlineHelp> tag of the appropriate widget doc/language.

* For version 2.1, I am hoping to move all the contents of the .dbf 
files into a different kind of storage ... hopefully an SQLite table. 
This would hopefully remove the limitations associated with dbf.  This 
would affect all the user-interface translation stuff but not the help 
documents

* In chameleon/common/xml_utils is XMLObject.php.  You include this file 
then create a new XMLObject( filename ).  This creates a php object 
representing the structure of your xml document.  You can then use 
methods on the root XMLObject to search for, or go directly to, a child 
object.  You can also use the php xml_parse_into_struct function 
directly (which is what XMLObject does) but it is a little confusing to 
understand what the output is.

Cheers,

Paul

Godwin, Elizabeth wrote:
> I am considering writing a small help widget for my application that 
> displays help for all the widgets I'm using.  At the moment it's a very 
> specialized widget that displays the info I want displayed.  I suppose 
> it could be made into something more dynamic... but that's for another day.
>  
> In doing this, I thought it would be nice to to the language handling of 
> the DBF files to handle the French vs English help descriptions.  The 
> problem here though is that these dbf files are limited to 256 (or 
> something close) characters.  If I'm mistaken on this, someone please 
> share. 
>  
> What I'm wondering is... how hard would it be to use xml files instead?  
> It would be easier then for me to store translations because there is no 
> limit on characters.  Is there a sample of a parsing function that comes 
> with Chameleon that I could modify for use in my templates?  Ideally it 
> would be nice if all of Chameleon could handle more than 256 chars in 
> language files, but I understand such a change would be a large 
> undertaking for the present time.
>  
> Cheers,
>  
> Liz
> 
> 
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