Arabic Language support and Unicode Performance

[Hari Shankar]

Dear all
I am supposed to develop a world ready application in C# 2003 (which will
run in xp) which should aupport Arabic & Hebrew also. My doubts(Fears) are:

1. Do i have to create all the forms, message boxes in Arabic also. Does it
mean that my application will have duplicate forms. One for Arabic and One
for Non-Arabic. I am planning to use Access 2000. How will the arabic tests
be written in the database? Can i be able to recognise/Display like normal
characters in my application?

2. I know that .NET 2003 supports Unicode 16 bit Encoding Scheme. Is it
possible to store Unicode strings in Access Database? If so then How will it
affect the performance of the application? say i am Sorting, concatenating
some 1000 records?
Moreover i may also have to send the unicode data to Graphic Displays!! Is
it easy and fast to convert the data using .NET namespace?

If any of you have faced/solved such issues, please help me out. If possible
hint me some references also.

Ciao
Hari

 

[Uri Dor]

Hi, Hari,
to your 1st question - I assume you'll have to have duplicate forms, one
for RTL and one for LTR. I don't know if anyone has a component which
will automatically convert an LTR layout to RTL, and how bad such a
conversion will look like. you can try - have all controls use "inherit"
as their RightToLeft property and horizontally-flip all controls if you
change it.
The problem is that some controls don't support RTL. Some of them can be
coerced into supporting it, such as treeviews, using code like this:
public class HebTreeView : TreeView
{
#region right to left (RTL) layout

const int WS_EX_LAYOUTRTL = 0x400000;
const int WS_EX_NOINHERITLAYOUT = 0x100000;
protected override CreateParams CreateParams
{
get
{
CreateParams CP = base.CreateParams;
if (/*MS Sample: !base.DesignMode && */RightToLeft ==
RightToLeft.Yes)
CP.ExStyle = CP.ExStyle | WS_EX_LAYOUTRTL
| WS_EX_NOINHERITLAYOUT;
return CP;
}
}
#endregion
}

to the 2nd question: yes, Access stores in Unicode. I'm not sure why
you're worried about performance when you only have ~1000 records.

regarding "graphic displays" - I didn't understand the question.

Shalom
Uri