Multi Language Iem Descriptions (1 Viewer)

[keithy]

Multi Language Item Descriptions

I have a table of some 8000 items with a verbose (memo field) description in English. I need to add French and Spanish Item descriptions to some of the items ( but not all of them) and call up the correct description when processing orders and/or invoices. I want the system to automatically supply the english text if the French/Spanish does not exist.

I could go for the easy option of adding a language field to the table, and then simply replicating all 8000 items for french and Spanish and then replace the English text. This would work but probably affect performance.

What I really want is to add foreign descriptions to the table ( as a new item record) as and when they are required, and look for, say, a French Item Description, and if one is there. then use it, else find the fallback English descriptions. Trouble is, I have had no success trying to craft the tables/queries to do this.

I've played with group-by queries to deliver a language code, but run into difficulties with grouping memo fields. Any help or pointers would be much appreciated - I've searched the forum for "multi lingual" and "multi language" with no success, but my apologies if I'm asking an old question.

I'm posting this in tables and queries as I am not sure which forum !!

Thanks for your attention

 

[keithy]

Kludged ! foreign Language Item descriptions

I've come up with a solution of sorts, which works, but I suspect there is a better one out there if I'm patient. For those of you that are interested, here it is:

I have split off the item descriptions into a seperate table to the other Item stuff, and added a 'language' and 'uniqueID' field, and populated it with english descriptions with language = "00". Foreign translations will be added as and when, with a language code ( based on international dial code, so French = "33")

I can then store the preferred language in the Customer Header, and reference this with a group-by query pulling out 'uniqueID' where total of 'language' = max and 'language' criteria is "00" or "33".

The upshot of this is that if a french description exists I get the uniqueId for that, because the Max value will be 33, and if it doesn't, 00 is the max value, so I can use the uniqueID to then pull the correct description record from the Product Description table.

This is a bit slow and clunky but it seems to work thus far, but if anyone has a better idea, or this sparks off ideas for improvement, I'd love to hear your comments.

Thanks for reading this far