Has anyone used and successfully deployed an application that requires
the entry and rendering of extended, printable characters in the
browser? I have a client with such a requirement but without an
extensive prototype test I wondered if any of you have had gotchas and
suggestions. They currently use a fat client to maintain and would
love to make web-based. I use telerik controls in most apps as well
and will check with them too.
Thanks in advance.
Doug
Hi Doug,
Do you mean Unicode chars, like accented letters or right-to-left
text ?
If you do, yes, there are several gotchas : how you render prices and
dates, which depend on both the UICulture and the Culture of your
page, the fact that TextBoxes have to have their "rtl" attributes set
to true for rtl languages (like arabic, for instance), and sorting the
data according to the language (which also involves setting a culture
parameter in your database), to name a few.
Add to that the fact that it's awfully difficult to debug anything in
exotic languages when you don't read said languages ("wait, do you
mean to say that the character which looks like, er, some sort of a
bird, er, flying leftwards, is supposed to be at the end of the word
and not at the beginning ?").
Apart than that, browsers do a large part of the job for you, and
Unicode has ironed out a ton of problems.
Here is the prototype I did :
- I created a page with a single textbox on it
- Went to Google News, on the bottom of the page are links to Google
News in other languages, including text in arabic, japanese, chinese,
korean and other I don't even know ; I copied this text and pasted it
into my textbox.
- The page sent this text into SQL
- On postback, I showed what was recorded in SQL on a simple label.
- The result was the same as the input; called a few friends with a
different language Windows/browser combination, and they all saw the
same thing. QED.
So you should go for it ! It's also a great skill to acquire and one
that is more and more sought after.
HTH,
Michel
