Does anyone know how the Data Dictionary and Language files actually work?

Scriptcase 9 Discussion
#1

I’m looking at translating a 300 app system to another language. I can see the basic structure of creating a data dictionary and then using the locals Application language to update a second language. So far so good… BUT

When I look at the Locales>Application language on a newly created Data dictionary, there is a whole lot of dross in the file, which looks like it MAY be important but it bears no relationship to my project.

This is what the file looks like:

language file
language file250×945 9.71 KB

I’d like to delete everything under Project Messages (There are lots more tables not on the picture), but I’m not confident that some of them are not needed for scriptcase to run.

Any views?

In addition, I’ve checked out the project/_lib/lang directory for the language files, but as far as I can tell they only contain the standard Scriptcase text…

where would the additional project ones be stored?

(e.g. if I’ve generated a table in the data dictionary)

Any help would be appreciated because as usual, the help manual is content free!

#2

Here is an update of some testing I’ve done in case it helps:
When you create a data dictionary, it seems to copy the existing one. In my case, this includes the samples applications, hence the massive amount of dross in the list.
If you create the data dictionary entries using the tool, it will convert the text (labels in this case) to {VARIABLES} like this:

data dic variables
data dic variables702×208 5 KB

When you look at the _lib/lang files, nothing will appear in them until you generate an application that uses the data dictionary variables… then they appear in the relevant language file like this:

lang_file contents
lang_file contents960×99 4.25 KB

Note, the lang file is actually a PHP script that sets all the language variables up so they can be accessed.

I’m going to clean up my data dictionary to remove the dross and hopefully it won’t break anything.