We are nearly finished with Internationalizing our workflow tool, ProcessIt. This has been a pretty significant effort, out of which has come a whole suite of tools that make it much easier to convert any Domino application to support multiple languages.

YES, I KNOW the "Spanish" in the image here is awful. I used Google's translation service to get something to put in all the places there was language. We are the in the process of getting real, actual, translations. The cool thing is, the way we built this, substituting them in is trivial. Really.

I'll write more about the whole toolset another day. Today, I want to concentrate on a single tool in the box and some interesting things we learned along the way.

This release of both the toolset and ProcessIt has concentrated on web-facing applications, although we have built all the tools with an eye toward making things work in the Notes client, too. One of the biggest challenges has been getting a great user experience for all the various dialog boxes you have to use.

Workflow applications, like pretty much any sophisticated Notes/Domino application, involve some amount of user interaction in the form of prompts, calendar pickers, date pickers, etc. One of our goals was to get rid of anything that required opening a new window. We wanted a modal-dialog-like experience.

And, we (which is a nice way of spreading the blame around by not saying "I, the anal-retentive one") didn't want to use the DoJo dialogs as they are, how can I put this nicely?, SLOW. As a result, we have spent a not-insignificant amount of time rolling our own, one of which you can see in the image above.

The calendar picker, which you see here, had a whole set of special problem because date fields have all kinds of different formats you can set them to use. So, we had to make it smart.

What was interesting, once we started digging into this, was to find out how really smart Domino is about dates on the web. I mean, sure, we all know that if you put a date into a field using the North American English-language Notes client, users on a Spanish-language Notes client will see that date in Spanish. If month names or abbreviations are included, they're translated. If not, the generic date format is re-swizzled from the US's MM/DD/YYYY to the rest of the world's DD/MM/YYYY.

But that's the Notes client. Of course it does that.

What I assumed (incorrectly, I might add), was that if you hit a North American English-language Domino server from a browser, you would get the North American English-language date formats, regardless of what language your browser was set to use.

But, you don't. You get local date formats and translations based on your browser's language. Who knew?

Given that, we were able to extract from the browser the correct month names and abbreviations, along with weekday names (you have to show the first letter of each weekday on the calendar picker, after all) and to use them to automatically update the picker to use YOUR language, whatever that is.

Also, if you're changing the date in a field which already has a date in it, the picker looks at the format of the date that's already there and, if it is unambiguous (that is, it can determine what it means for sure), it will put the new date back into the field using the same format as the one coming out...whatever that may be.

Pretty cool, if I say so myself.

If the starting field is blank, or if the date is something we cannot be absolutely sure of (for instance, "03/07/08" could mean March 7, 2008; July 3, 2008; or even July 8, 2003 to Domino), well, in that case it defaults to a simple DD-MON-YYYY format (like 07-Mar-2008--translated into your language, of course) which, it turns out, Domino can always deal with, regardless of what format the field is "supposed" to have.

In my testing, this was actually a pleasant surprise: Domino will take ANY non-ambiguous date value and properly convert it during the save. Enter "2008~3~July" into a field and Domino will figure it out and convert it to its own internal date format (then show it to you the next time in whatever format the field calls for).

Once again, I'm mildly amazed at what's inside the yellow box.

1. Jeovani Junco08/29/2008 05:15:13 PM
Homepage: http://www.eteam.com.co/miblog.nsf

Hi, By the image you post here, I can say it's not a good spanish translation.

2. Scott Good08/29/2008 06:12:04 PM
Homepage: http://www.scottgood.com

Damn. I knew I should have said something about that. The translations are straight off of Google's translation engine. There has been no effort so far to get them right...we've been concentrating on getting the technology to work. Good translations come next.

Thanks,

Scott