[udig-devel] German translation update and a request to all "String buil

["Matthias Basler" <matthiasbasler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi uDiggers,

once again I have committed the German adaptations to the latest changes in the properties files.

One thing I noted and about which I was very disappointed is that obviously many developers of uDig still think it a good idea to build dynamic Strings in the following way:

String myMessage = msgPart1 + someFile + msgPart2 + someOtherContent;

To give a "nice" example from "WorldImageServiceExtension":
  return
Messages.WorldImageServiceExtension_needsFile+"\n\t-"+worldFile+"\n"+Messages.WorldImageServiceExtension_or+"\n\t-"+otherWorldFile; 

For all of you who havn't yet realized: This is a very bad way to build dynamic Strings for four reasons:

1. Not every language splits sentences in the same way as English. For example if you have two arguments a foreign language might integrate them in different order. Can you tell how a Chinese translator would build up the sentence???

2. Having two or three sentence parts (or single words) as texts in the .properties files makes it sometimes hard to guess (without looking at the source code) which texts will be combined how later.

3. Some of the cases even expect whitespaces in the properies files (otherwise they end up with something like
  "The fileimage.pngcould not be loaded because ofNullPointerException.")
My ressource bundle editor ignores (and deletes) trailing whitespaces, and I tend to say that it does so correctly, because leading and trailing whitespaces in properties files are really a bad habit.

4. Sentences that try to avoid correct dynamic structures often take the form "I have this or that problem with following file: " + myfile
So they end with a colon and then give the argument. While this is usually not a problem in English language, this structure leads to unaesthetic and forced sentences in other languages.

I hope these arguments are enough to reconsider your choice!

So, PLEASE, whenever arguments are needed in Strings, try to use the
MessageFormat.format(string, arguments) function or something similar. 
Example:
MessageFormat.format(
    "This is a dynamic String with {0} and {1}.",
    new Object[]{"Argument 1", "Argument 2"})
There are already some examples of this in uDig source code, so probably people DO know but simply are too lazy or too much in a hurry to care.

Maybe each module maintainer can check his/her module for occurrences?
This is a problem very common in the catalog plugins (e.g. for error messages), but I found it in a few other plugins as well.

PS. I havn't created a JIRA task yet, simply because having this as ONE task would create one of those "never finished" tasks and because I am too lazy to create an issue for each and every plugin.

PPS. Tip: If you really need whitespaces in your code, use ' ' and '\n' instead of  " "  resp. "\n" and you can save yourself the "//$NON-NLS-1$".
-- 
Matthias Basler
matthiasbasler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx