Beware Regional Locales
Remember a while back I had problems with this server setting:
I can't find the blog entry in question, as it was unrelated, but somebody happened to notice that the time-stamps on its responses were out of sync. After some digging about I found that the server was set to use the time-zone of the user based on their browser's accept-language. I turned off this setting and all is now well.
Last week I was on the phone to an American client as he talked me through a website of his. One of the pages he showed me was a view. I commented on how the "price" column was in Pounds Sterling. He told me it wasn't and that it was in US Dollars. I told him the column was definitely showing me the £ symbol and not $. He was disappointed to find that Domino had not bothered converting the currency using today's exchange rates (now that would be something), but had simply changed the symbol used.
It was obvious what was happening. The server is set to use the user's browser locale to decide how to internationalise what they see. This is the default behaviour. Here's the default settings for a currency column:
If you simply use all the defaults you might end up with a nasty shock. Imagine you have a product for £1,000 and you advertise it to the Americans at $1,000. They get a good deal and you get yourself in hot water with the "Office of Fair Trading".
If you want to test this out you need to know how to change your browser's accept-language setting. In IE you do this from the General tab of the Options dialog. Just press the Languages button and add a new one to the top of the list.
The moral is that you need to be wary of using currency in any site you create for an international market. My advice is to disable this server settings. It's a nice feature but I am yet to find a time when it's anything but a nuisance.
Talking of currency, I fly to Lithuania in the morning. Euros? Thanks to you guys (Tyron Barrett and David Wallace) I got an reply to this post and we managed to get the Stag a t-shirt with this Lithuanian phrase on it:
Aš vesiu. Ar noretum bu-ti mano žmona.
He won't have a clue what it means. Anyway, weather looks good over there. I'll get some photos and report back on Monday.
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This is offtopic but I'm still having problems emailing you Jake Argh!!! Can you email me another email address...
Brett - Australia
Jake,
You need Lita for this weekend and if you bring traveller chqs then USD is preferred or so my bank told me.
Cheers
Matt
Be also careful with dates. Domino also returns you a date according to your Accept Language setting.
In France, dates are formatted like : dd/mm/yyyy, whereas in US it's : mm/dd/yyyy. I used to browse with an US firefox with default accept language, which might be confusing with Domino because our 2 june 2005 (02/06/2005) is displayed as 6 february 2005 (06/02/2005).
Hi Jake,
I do know one example where it is not a nuisance: calendar views. I am a developper in Canada, so I have to do a lot (i.e. 95%) of websites that are bilingual (French-English). If the server setting is not activated, it will mean that those views will be displayed in only one language, and this can hurt certain "sensibilities". IMHO, the main problem is the defaut settings for the currency: Notes should default to the language of the application and not the user's. Dates and Number format are fine but currencies, that can cause a lot more harm.
Have a nice trip.
I agree to Alexandre, it's the currencies settings that suck. My advice is pretty simple: Wherever Domino gives you a choice named currency - don't use it.
Currency fields, currency columns, currency data type in LS: It's all crap. The former two due to the obvious results described by Jake, the latter because, it is fixed to 4 significant decimal digits. So, it isn't even usefull for EUR conversion.