updatable query/"translated" view of a table

[Yannick Majoros]

Hello,

Hope this is the right newgroup...

For some multilingual application, I have a table with all strings in
different languages. Each entry has a reference, a language and a text
value, e.g.:

Ref Language Value
greeting en Hello
greeting fr Bonjour

Now, I tried to build a form for easy translation between french and
english (let's say it is a special case).

So, I thought I'd base in on a query which would include a string in
english, it's reference and it's value in french (if it exists). Here is
what I would want:

Ref English_text French_text
greeting Hello Bonjour


Writing this query wasn't a problem, but... It isn't updatable :-( .

It seems queries based on 1 single table aren't. I tried with different
joint types, with implicit queries (you know, SELECT * FROM Strings AS
Strings_fr, Strings AS Strings_en), subqueries, ... The best I was able
to do was to use a "calculated" field for the french text, which used
some db to do another select... It works almost, except I can't update
the french text, naturally.

I need this updatable query to base my form on it. Or is there another
way?

I don't think it would be a good idea to change my table structure to
have both "English_text" and "French_text", because I could want to add
languages later. And I have a similar problem with, say, my user
preferences which are stored in a similar page, but which I would want
to be updatable by a form...

Any ideas, anyone?

Best regards,

Yannick Majoros

 

[David F Cox]

This may be leading you astray, but my first thoughts are to have a table:-

Tbltrans:
id autonumber
ref text 'the English word
lang text 'e.g. French or an abbreviation
translation text

For each new reference word and each language I would append a record.

It should then be easy to generate an updateable query for each language
where the translation was null.

apologies if this is a time-waster.

 

[Yannick Majoros]

David F Cox a écrit :

This may be leading you astray, but my first thoughts are to have a table:-

Tbltrans:
id autonumber
ref text 'the English word
lang text 'e.g. French or an abbreviation
translation text

For each new reference word and each language I would append a record.

It should then be easy to generate an updateable query for each language
where the translation was null.

apologies if this is a time-waster.

Ok, this is about the table I have. But I would like to display the
english text next to the french text in a continuous form. I can't do
that if I just do a query which takes every string from one language.

So, my question is: how can I write a query which gives the strings in
both languages and which is updatable ?

Best regards,

Yannick Majoros

 

[Peter Martin]

I think the solution is in the form design. You could have a continuous
form based on the table and an unbound combo in the header showing the ref
and filtering on it afterupdate. Default for the bound ref would be the
value of the unbound combo. You can approximate a horizontal layout by
putting the combo on a single form and the text in continuous subform,
mastered to the unbound combo.