[thelist] [MS SQL Trickery] Is my technique good, bad, or neither?

Tab Alleman Tab.Alleman at MetroGuide.com
Thu Aug 21 09:58:13 CDT 2003


Joshua Olson wrote:

> I also decided that they should be able to change the default language
> whenever they wanted to.  So, instead of programmatically rewriting

Who is "they"?  

If I'm understanding you, you've got a program that re-writes your UDF
and changes the "11" to something else.  So no matter what, there's
always one default language, but someone can run your program and change
what that default language is.  

Knowing only what I know about the other dynamics of your situation, I'm
thinking how much cooler would it be to have a Users table, with a
column for DefaultLanguage.  The UDF queries the user table to get the
default language for that user, or maybe you don't even need a UDF and
just do a straight query. If it only starts with one user and the one
column, it may seem like a waste, but it's a scalable waste.  :)  

So what's to stop "them" from choosing a default language that ..um..
that an item that they want to view doesn't have text in (ugh)?  Is
there a core set of languages (or maybe only one language) that
definitely is available for every field of every item?  If so, do you
limit the choice of default language to those core languages only?
Maybe you could set up some sort of cascade (if the first choice of
language isn't available, try the second choice...etc...).

Hope something in there helps a little!
T


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