[Chameleon] language handling - xml??

[Godwin, Elizabeth]

Paul, 

I didn't know that there was another Help system available.  I gave up
on HelpWidget.  I guess it's time I refreshed my CVS copy.  I was
planning a journey into creating my own help system for an app I'm
working on.  I was going to use the dbf language file method to do my
translations until I ran into this snag with string lengths.

I will have a look at this EmbeddedHelp and the xml_utils and see what I
can come up with.

Thanks!!

Liz

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Spencer [mailto:pspencer at dmsolutions.ca] 
> Sent: October 19, 2004 11:25 AM
> To: Godwin, Elizabeth
> Cc: chameleon at lists.maptools.org
> Subject: Re: [Chameleon] language handling - xml??
> 
> 
> 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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