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Developing International Applications

  • Article

To move into the world market, you must design your Visual FoxPro applications so they are as effective internationally as domestically. This section describes how to use the international features of Visual FoxPro to produce applications for selected locales.

In This Section

  • Preparation of an International Application
    Preparing an international application usually involves three steps: creating data, writing code, and designing a user interface.
  • Design of the Interface
    Because text tends to increase when you localize an application, it is important to be careful when designing the user interface components.
  • Entering International Data
    An important aspect of developing international applications is understanding how to enter data into your application.
  • Code Pages in Visual FoxPro
    Data stored in Visual FoxPro often is tagged with a code page, which is a table of characters and corresponding numbers in memory that Microsoft Windows uses to display data properly.
  • Code Pages Supported by Visual FoxPro
    A code page is a set of characters specific to a language or hardware platform. Accented characters are not represented by the same values across platforms and code pages.
  • Sorting Data in International Applications
    After creating a table of international data, check to see if your application sorts the data correctly. How the data sorts depends on the code page associated with the table, because the code page specifies the available sort orders or collation sequences.
  • Creating or Modifying International Applications
    You can prevent localization problems with code by observing certain guidelines.
  • Managing Files in an International Application
    The Project Manager can help you organize an international application. In a project you can integrate the parts of an application, such as forms, menus, programs, and reports.
  • Extending Applications
    To extend a basic Visual FoxPro application, you can enable it to work for multiple users, take advantage of Microsoft ActiveX controls and automation-enabled applications, and add international capabilities. Visual FoxPro programming features are designed to improve developer productivity, including Access and Assign methods, support for more graphic file formats, and language to simplify programming tasks.
  • Developing Visual FoxPro Applications
    This section includes conceptual information about how to develop Visual FoxPro applications, instructions for creating databases and the user interface, and other tasks needed to create Visual FoxPro applications.
  • Programming in Visual FoxPro
    Visual FoxPro is a powerful interactive data management tool, but you also can access the full power of Visual FoxPro by creating applications. Understanding object-oriented programming techniques and the event-driven model can maximize your programming productivity.