Below is a simple use case to explain a complex problem.
Consider a BS which is deployed in an international company operating globally.
User Story: Customer Orders are entered in Spain, checked in France, fulfilled in Germany, and delivered by the Dutch logistics department.
The following BO exist.
Product
- Product Name
- Product Size
- Product Stock Balance
OrderHeader
- Order Number
- Customer Number
OrderDetail
- OrderHeader
- Product
The Product name is to be shown to the local user in the user's own language.
At order entry: Spanish user selects from a list of products in Spanish.
At order check: French user reads the order details and sees the product names in French. Not only that, s/he changes one order line to a different product because the ordered product was superseded by a new product. S/he chooses the new product from a list of products in French.
At order fulfilment: German user reads the German names of products to be picked.
At order delivery: Dutch truck driver checks the Dutch delivery note against the items to be delivered.
Solutions that were considered:
A. A locale attribute in the Product BO.
B. ProductNameLocale BO containing an instance for each Product/Locale combination.
C. Product.Name column each for the supported locales. Eg NameSpanish, NameGerman, NameFrench, NameDutch etc.
Solution A works only during selection and input of an OrderDetail instance. All other users will see the product name in the original selected entry. Besides which, the Stock Balance is now duplicated across all localised instances of a single produce.
Solution B could work the same way as solution A if one can use a presentation of some kind to show the product.productnamelocale.name somehow. (something like a shortcut that can contain a query matching the user.locale with the instance). The rest of the user story fails however.
Solution C does not work firstly because one cannot return a particular column(attribute) based on a WHERE clause in a query.
Has anyone else had to deal with this problem?
It seems to me that a great feature would be to have a new attribute type: LocaleArray which would allow entering the values for each locale and which will present the appropriate value depending on the user locale.
