Supporting Arabic (or other Foreign Languages) in CF7, FCK Editor, MS SQL

[Guest]

I am searching the web for any advice, technical tutorials or regarding developing a CF site that can handle the input of, storage (MS SQL) and output of Arabic. I have developed a CF CMS which utilizes the FCK Editor for text input, MS SQL 2000 or 2005 for storage and standard CF to HTML output. I have to assume that we will have to do something at the database level to store the proper character sets but is there anything else? Thanks for any advice, short of posting Spanish we have not done any foreign language support in the past.

[Newsgroup_User]

larrabeeibc wrote:
> to assume that we will have to do something at the database level to store the
> proper character sets but is there anything else? Thanks for any advice, short
> of posting Spanish we have not done any foreign language support in the past.

- use unicode for all parts of your app
- use cfprocessingdirective religiously
- use the "N" datatypes for your string columns in sql server (do this for all
your string columns if you use cfqueryparam)
- learn about BIDI
- read the G11N chapter in ben's cf book
- have a look at the icu4j lib, does it do stuff your app/client needs?
- do you need to support islamic calendars?
- does your app use QoQ sorting?

[Guest]

Thanks Paul the "N" Datatypes point sent me down the right path. I think I have it working (Arabic and English side by side in a single DB table). I converted the datatypes to "N" and in the CFMX7 administrator I set the DSN so unicode was enabled in the advanced settings. We have the luxury here in that we can use English dates to order by etc so I don't have to worry about additional settings on the MS SQL Server.

[Newsgroup_User]

larrabeeibc wrote:
> the datatypes to "N" and in the CFMX7 administrator I set the DSN so unicode
> was enabled in the advanced settings. We have the luxury here in that we can

remember that's for use w/cfqueryparam. also note that under a load that slows
down db performance as the drive doesn't know which columns are unicode so it
spends some time converting back & forth. you should convert all your text
columns to N datatypes to avoid this (or not use cfqueryparam but that's not a
good choice for public facing applications).

[Ted_Daniels]

A couple of years ago I wrote a CF app for searching, storing and displaying in Arabic, and I don't speak a word of Arabic, but the users tell me it worked fine. I'll hunt around and try to find it and copy it to you