OSF DCE Application Development Guide--Core Components

Chapter 15. Writing Internationalized RPC
Applications
An internationalized DCE RPC application is one that
• Uses the operating system platform’s locale definition functions to establish
language-specific and culture-specific conventions for the user and programming
environment.
• Isolates all user-visible messages into message catalogs by using the sams (symbols
and message strings) utility.
• Uses the DCE general-purpose application messaging routines, dce_msg_*() and
dce_svc_*(), to display all program messages.
• Uses DCE RPC-provided or user-defined character and code set evaluation and
automatic conversion features to ensure character and code set interoperability
during the transfer of international characters in remote procedure calls between RPC
clients and servers.
A locale defines the subset of a user’s environment that depends upon language and
cultural conventions. A locale consists of categories; each category controls specific
aspects of some operating system components’ behaviors. Categories exist for character
classification and case conversion, collation order, date and time formats, numeric
nonmonetary formatting, monetary formatting, and formats of informative and diagnostic
messages and interactive responses.
The locale also determines the character sets and code sets used in the environment. The
syntax and use of a locale definition function depends on the operating system platform
in use with DCE. See your operating system programming guide and reference
documentation for a description of the system’s locale definition functions and locale
categories.
The sams utility provides DCE services and application programs with a method for
defining and cataloging user-visible messages, while the DCE messaging functions allow
DCE services and application programs to display messages in a consistent manner.
Chapter 3 describes how to develop an application that uses the DCE messaging routines
and how to use the sams utility to create and generate message catalogs. See the OSF
DCE Application Development Reference for a description of DCE messaging routine
syntax, and the sams(1dce) reference page for a description of sams usage.
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