Views provides a simple mechanism to help you manipulate multilingual applications. This mechanism is called the messages mechanism and is based on the IlvMessageDatabase class.

It uses a database that stores different translations of the same message. Depending on the current language, the appropriate message is accessed. Each instance of the IlvDisplay class creates its own message database. It reads the database description from the file name provided in the environment variable ILVDB, or views .dbm if this variable is not set. This file is searched for in the display path. You can access this database by calling the member function IlvDisplay::getDatabase.

Each string that you plan to show in different languages can be stored in the database with its different possible translations; that is, you associate a message identifier with different message strings, depending on the language you target. The language is specified in a symbol object (IlSymbol class). Following is some sample code:

The Views environment variable ILVLANG lets you override your current language (for example, English, French, or Japanese).