What Are the Cloudscape Tools and Utilities?
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Tools and Localization

The Cloudscape tools provide support for common localization features (such as localized message files and GUI, locale-appropriate formatting of data, codesets, unicode identifiers and data, and database locales). For general information about international Cloudscape systems, see the Internationalization appendix in the Cloudscape Developer's Guide.

About Locales

In the Cloudscape documentation, we refer to three locales:

  • Java System locale

    This is the locale of your machine, which is automatically detected by your JVM. For Cloudscape and Cloudscape tools, the Java system locale determines the default locale.

  • Database Locale

    This is the locale associated with your database when it is created or upgraded. By default, this is the same as the Java System locale. The database locale determines the language of database errors, sort order for international data types, and so on.

  • ij or Cloudview Session locale

    This locale is associated with your ij or Cloudview session. The session locale determines the display language for error messages and GUI text. This locale also determines the localized display format for numbers, dates, times, and timestamps. Typically, you specify a session locale if you want to view messages and GUI text in a language other than that of the Java System locale. To specify a session locale, use the cloudscape.ui.locale property when starting ij or Cloudview.

Database Locale

To specify a database locale, use the locale attribute on the URL connection when creating (or upgrading) the database, or from the New Database dialog in Cloudview.

NOTE: You cannot modify a database's locale after the database has been created or upgraded from a previous Cloudscape version.

For information about database locales, see the Internationalization appendix in the Cloudscape Developer's Guide.

Specifying a Locale for Messages and Display Text

By default, ij and Cloudview messages and text display in the language of the system locale. When starting ij or Cloudview, you can use the cloudscape.ui.locale property to override the default system locale for the duration of the ij or Cloudview session. To specify a locale for message and GUI text, set the cloudscape.ui.locale property to a supported locale when you start ij or Cloudview.

Specifying an Alternate Codeset

You can specify an alternate codeset for your tool session.

Use the cloudscape.ui.codeset property when starting ij or Cloudview. This property can be useful when working with scripts created on a different system or data that was imported or exported from a system with a codeset different from your system's default codeset.

Formatting Display of Locale-sensitive Data

To display dates, timestamps, numbers, and times in the format of the ij or Cloudview Session locale, use the View, Local Data Representation menu option (Cloudview), or the LocalizedDisplay command (ij).

NOTE: These options do not change how Cloudscape stores locale-sensitive data, simply how the tool displays the data.

The following example demonstrates using localizedDisplay in an en_US locale:

ij> VALUES CURRENT_DATE;
SQLCol1
----------
2000-05-01
1 row selected
ij> localizeddisplay on;
ij> VALUES CURRENT_DATE;
SQLCol1
------------------
May 1, 2000
1 row selected

Importing and Exporting Data Between Locales and Codesets

With the Import/Export utilities, you can specify locales and codesets for:

  • storing and processing of data in native form (for example, language-specific characters and collating sequences)
  • native representation of culture-sensitive data (such as date, currency, number, and timestamps)
  • data input and output in any native encoding

For information about localized import/export operations, see Chapter 6, "Using the Bulk Import and Export Utilities".