Oracle APEX Globalization Tips for sleeping well

Yesterday it was my G-day: alea iacta est!

I finally decided to go global with a tiny application i am developing and i embarked myself on the translation mission.

I was really eager to start investigating the built-in translation facilities of Oracle Application Express as i felt that:

1. There was a huge gap in the knowledge of this area on my side.
   
2. I had the impression that this was one of the strongest points of Apex: a robust, flexible and powerful mechanism for delivering a localized application in almost every aspect.

Funnily enough, both facts proved to be true, at my expense.

I set out and took this application in its current development status and, following the recipe in the on-line help, i created a mapped english version.
Then i started playing aroung with XLIFF files, exporting, importing, checking and unchecking options in order to understand how the process works.
I just didn't realize exactly what Oracle meant by seeding an application.
Or better said, i didn't understand early enough the implications of seeding.

I thought it was just a way of freezing the value of labels, titles and so on, but actually it was much more than that.
One must understand that, if a dedicated application ID is required to handle each translated version, that means a lot more than just translated labels.

So, after a while i left this globalization exercise and went back to develop my application.
Strange things began to happen.
I must say, begging for pity, that yesterday i was tired, my back was in pain, the night before i went to sleep very late and woke up very early, there was a flood, the grasshoppers...
IT WASN'T MY FAULT!

Anyway, i was modifying some processes in a page and when i went out to try them, either they didn't work as expected or they did something weird. Values disappearing without explanation. Processes that didn't fire. Checkpoints ignored.

I was really upset.

The fact is i had completely overlooked my previous globalization experiments.

Finally, for some reason, i took the decision that saved my night or what remained of it.

I changed the request string of a button. I don't even know why i did that, i was almost desperate, i had rewritten code, attempting to raise errors that got never fired, i was to the point to give up!

Then i went to test this final change, sort of Armageddon, to see what the hell was happening with my program, and to my big astonishment, the button was still carrying the old request.

There was a light at the end of this tunnel.

Eventually i realized that i was testing the page with a "wrong" language setting, diverting me to the translated, globalized, yet dramatically old version of the code.

As i translated only the first page and the others were still carrying the original untranslated text, i could not spot the difference between the new and the old one, moreover i hadn't change any items or layout thing, i had just been working on processes, so it looked the same, but it wasn't doing the same!

I changed the browser's language setting to match the application's primary language and everything was starting to work normally again. EUREKA!

Moral, here are my commandments:

1. Go to bed on time.
   
2. Translate an application when it's finished, not when you are still muddling the whole thing.
3. Make translated labels look different. Do something, translate them or just put a reminder, insert something that let's you understand at once that what you see is not the original primary application's text.
4. Set the primary language in the browser such that it matches the primary language of the application, so you don't get diverted to a translated version unless you explicitly want to test that particular version.
   

In case you prefer to breach my commandments, remember to seed the application for each translated version you've mapped to your primary application's language every time you make substantial changes.
Seeding will keep all application versions in sync, recycling translated attributes, purging what's no longer there and adding new entries.

But in the end i am really amazed by how simple and quick is to create a translated version of an application, even if i was almost to the point of throwing my laptop out of the window.


Happy globalization!