User Guide

Table Of Contents
416 Chapter 17: Developing Globalized Applications
Handling data in ColdFusion MX
Many of the issues involved with globalizing applications deal with processing data from the
various sources supported by ColdFusion MX, including the following:
General character encoding issues
Locale-specific content
Input data from URLs and HTML forms
File data
Databases
E-mail
HTTP
LDAP
WDDX
COM
CORBA
Searching and indexing
This section describes how to handle data from each of these sources.
General character encoding issues
Applications developed for earlier versions of ColdFusion that assumed that the character length
of a string was the same as the byte length might produce errors in ColdFusion MX. The byte
length of a string depends on the character encoding.
Locale-specific content
The following sections provide information on how to handle locale-specific content in pages that
support multiple locales, and how to handle euro values.
Generating multi-locale content
In an application that supports users in multiple locales and produces output that is specific to
multiple locales, you call the
SetLocale function in every request to set the locale for that specific
request. When processing has completed, the locale should be set back to its previous value. One
useful technique is to save the user’s desired locale in a Session variable once the user has selected
it, and use the Session variable value to set the locale for each user request during the session.