Application arrangement and architecture

When you design an international application, consider the ways that you can organize and structure your application so that it can be used in an international environment.

In particular, consider the following strategies:

• Separate program modules at appropriate places
• Name application parts appropriately for a multilingual environment
• Refer to specifications whenever possible
• Provide multiple sets of logical files in separate libraries when working with database definitions

The following figure shows you the recommended way to organize the parts of your application.

• Program module separation
  You can separate cultural-dependent parts from your running code and set up cultural-dependent environments. You can do this using system values, user profile attributes, job attributes, and object attributes.
• Application part names
  When you want to enable your application for different languages and countries, consider the environments of the target systems in your naming conventions.
• Specification references
  Define all your fields first in the field reference file of your application and refer to them whenever you can: in the database specifications, in device file specifications, and in the high-level language programs. This technique helps you to define the field specifications once and use them again.
• Database definitions
  You define a file to specify certain facts, and the specifications are then used on database files.