Right-to-left language support

An overview of Vitalware's support for Right-to-left languages can be found here.

To support RTL languages in Vitalware, all data controls (e.g. RichEdit, Grid and Combobox controls) have been upgraded to support Unicode. All other user interface controls (e.g. menus, tabs, etc.) have not changed and still use single byte based character sets. The change to data controls means any Unicode character may be entered into a data field and it will be displayed and saved correctly. If the Vitalware server encoding is set to utf-8, the data will also appear correctly in reports and on the Internet.

For clients who do not have the Vitalware server encoding set to utf-8, a mapping takes place where all data characters are translated from the server encoding that has been used into UTF-8 before being displayed, thus causing the correct characters to be shown. A reverse mapping takes place for all Unicode data entered into controls when saved to the Vitalware server.

When the Vitalware client is invoked it queries the Vitalware server to determine the encoding used. Once the client knows the encoding, it performs all the necessary translations to ensure the data is displayed and saved correctly.

As non-data controls have not been upgraded to their Unicode equivalent they will display text (in most cases prompts) using the character set defined by the Prompts language setting. In rare instances this may result in the incorrect display of individual characters (for example, selecting French as the language for Prompts and trying to show an Arabic character). In general this should not occur as all prompt based strings are translated using the character set for the language specified for Prompts.