UI text strings

Mobile device users can select the language used by their devices for UI texts. Symbian platform native applications typically use these language settings to determine which language is displayed when an application is launched. The language used in your application depends on how you have implemented your UI texts:

• Recommended : In the recommended approach, text strings in resource files are mapped to logical names in the code. This means that your application can switch between different language packs according to locale and the wishes of the end-user.

• Not recommended : If you hard code text strings into your code, then your application will only be in the language used in the code and will not be able to take advantage of the flexibility made available by the recommended approach described approach.

In the recommended approach, when the application framework launches an application, it loads the application resource file. The application framework compares the system locale language setting with the available resource files, and loads the resource file whose extension matches the locale language code. If there is no match, then the system loads the resource file with the extension rsc .

For example, if the language of a device is set to German, then the application framework attempts to find a resource file for the application with the extension r03 , since 03 is the code for German. If there is no resource file with a matching extension, then the application framework loads the resource file for the application with the extension rsc .

In order to ensure that your application will be localizable:

• Do not embed UI text strings in your code files

• Do not hard code the size of text buffers