Using Siebel Tools > Working with Strings and Other Locale-Specific Data >

About the Advanced Compile Option

Developers frequently have the following two problems when localizing repositories:

• Localization is not complete when testing begins.

  Because of project schedules, developers usually start testing configuration changes without localized strings, which become available much later. This often means that they must delay testing until the localized strings are available.

• Missing translations can be difficult to find.

  Once developers have the localized strings imported, they start testing using a language SRF. But they often miss some strings—not all language translations were loaded, development continued beyond the localization export date, or some projects were mistakenly not exported.

  These missing localized values can cause screens not to appear, tabs to be blank, or field labels not to appear—behavior that can be due to a variety of causes, and can be difficult to find and diagnose.

The Advanced Compile option in Siebel Tools version 8.0 solves these problems by doing the following:

• Inserting "dummy" strings where translations are missing so that all functionality works.
• Adding pseudolocalization prefixes to strings. These prefixes can include characters, such as accented European letters and Asian characters, to test their appearance in the desired languages.

Adding prefixes serves two main purposes:

• Detection of hard-coded strings. Adding the prefix makes the string different from the original English string, so that any code that depends on checking a hard-coded string will break.

  For example, if the code checks for the status of a customer to be "ACTIVE" and that string is hard-coded within the program, it will not match the modified status string that says "ÐØÉ_ACTIVE."

• Detection of code that will not accept non-ASCII characters. Any script or add-in product that has not been correctly internationalized will most likely cause an error when faced with a string such as "ÐØÉ_ACTIVE." This error would not otherwise be detected until localization has been performed, which might be too late in the project cycle to correct immediately.

An additional benefit of the prefixing option is that strings can be lengthened by up to three characters. This allows testing of field and column sizes to make sure that they can accept localized strings where the translation is longer than the original text. This commonly occurs in Western European languages.

NOTE:  The Advanced Compile option does not change the underlying data in the repository, only the strings in the compiled SRF file. The Advanced Compile feature only works on strings that are in the S_SYM_STR table (that is, strings normally exportable with the LMU tool). It does not work on error messages contained in separate products such as Siebel Handheld or in third-party products such as Actuate reports.