Re: Advice sought

Thanks, Galen. I'm going to fool around with your idea and may have more questions. I do need to solve the problem of formatting phones, addresses etc. as well as get some sources for data. As you say, those are separate problems, but still ones I have to solve. What did you do - leave it up to the users to enter their own data? Did you prepopulate any tables with foreign information?

Van

"Galen Boyer" <galenboyer_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:u4rugu9nw.fsf_at_primix.com...
> On Sat, 19 May 2001, vmessner_at_bestweb.net wrote:
>
> > I need to resolve both those issues.
> >
> >
> > "Galen Boyer" <galenboyer_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message
> > news:uheyiavjy.fsf_at_primix.com...
> >> On Sat, 19 May 2001, vmessner_at_bestweb.net wrote:
> >>
> >> > I have a database design I believe will accommodate all
> >> > countries addresses and phones but what about data?
> >>
> >> Are you going to need to display the same pages, with the same
> >> text, except in different languages as well?
>
> I would recommend two tables for each logical entity. I used a
> design which I called the B&L (Base and Language). For example,
> I had a logical account table which look liked
>
> create table account(
> act_id number
> act_status number
> act_name varchar2(100)
> ...
> )
>
>
> I split this into two tables like
>
> create table account_b(
> act_id number
> act_status number
> )
>
> and
>
> create table account_l(
> act_id number
> language_code char(3)
> act_name varchar2(100)
> )
>
> I then joined account_b and account_l to bring back account. I
> did every single logical table this way.
>
> Why?
>
> So, the main database had the B&L structure, but then each
> language that was supported had a schema, maybe, jp_user,
> en_user, ch_user, ...
>
> The application needed to know whether the person browsing the
> site wanted what language. The application then logged in as the
> correct user and accessed the account object which was a view of
> the B&L where language_code = 'EN' or 'CH' ...
>
> Then, the application actually never needed to be aware of the
> language except, of course on entry into the database. Each user
> had the exact same set of views which all accessed the main
> database on language code. Worked out pretty nice.
>
> Make sense?
>
> >> Or, are you looking for how to deal with addresses, phones and
> >> such?
>
> Sounds like you need different help here.
>
>
> --
> Galen
> I don't want to be the rock. Yeah, okay, what do you want to be?
> I want to be the piece of glass.
Received on Sun May 20 2001 - 18:41:55 CDT