localization of strings

[wintergreen]

I'm pondering the concept of abstracting all the strings (mostly messages that appear in dialog boxes) I'm using in a specific solution to a single place.

Doing so would allow me to:

1. Reference all the strings from a single location.

2. Add localization pretty easily.

3. Imagine for a moment I was using a "grown-up" development environment...

Anyway I have a couple ideas of how to do this, but they pretty much boil down to one of the following:

• Storing a list of strings in a custom function

• Storing each string as a record in a specific table

I was wondering if anyone has experience of doing something similar, or knows of a "preferred" way of doing this.

[Fitch]

Either of those options could work. Another possibility might be to use a script, which you could invoke with a parameter and exit with a result (the string).

[wintergreen]

Yes that is a good idea.

How would that compare in terms of performance vs using records in a table?

I suppose the other thing is that I'd at least be able to use find/replace etc on table entries.

I've ruled out the possibility of using a custom function for now, as that would be a bit problematic for multi-file solutions

[Fitch]

I imagine that a script, invoking the calculation engine, would generally be faster than a process that finds records. But I don't think you'd see a noticeable performance hit either way, since you're using this for dialogs, which stop the action anyway.

[wintergreen]

A very good point.