User's Guide

Introduction to the User's Guide

This introduction discusses the following topics:

Who Should Use this Guide?

Software and QA engineers who use Globalyzer in their software development efforts are the primary audience for this user's guide and related documents.

This guide is not intended for system administrators or others who may be responsible for setting up a Globalyzer Server or managing workgroup accounts. Administration tasks lie outside the scope of this user's guide.

It is assumed that engineers who plan to fix source code problems detected by Globalyzer understand the internationalization issues and solutions specific to their software architecture. Furthermore, engineers who plan to configure or alter the Rule Sets for their projects must understand the basics of Regular Expression usage. The Globalyzer documentation is not intended to address these topics in detail, although, where possible, supplemental information is included on these topics.

In general, the Globalyzer interface will be fairly intuitive to engineers familiar with software IDEs or similar applications.

What is Globalyzer?

Engineers use Globalyzer to:

  • assess the scope of software internationalization efforts,
  • analyze and fine-tune Globalyzer scan results,
  • share scan results, and
  • fix internationalization issues in their source code.

Assessing Internationalization Efforts

Globalyzer's powerful, rules-based code scanner scans your source codebase looking for potential internationalization issues. The scanner can detect embedded strings (text strings that users might see), locale-sensitive methods (methods that might produce locale-specific results, such as date or currency methods), static file references (paths to images or other static files that require localization), and general patterns that you define.

The scanner is capable of detecting and reporting internationalization issues for software written in: ActionScript, C#, C/C++, Delphi, HTML, Java, JavaScript, MXML, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Qt, SQL, Swift2, Visual Basic, VBScript and XML. If you need Globalyzer to scan any other programming languages, just send us an email at support@lingoport.com. We are always changing and updating our product, and we want to know what our potential future customers need.

Analyzing/Fine-tuning Scan Results

After Globalyzer scans your code base, it generates a Scan Results table for each type of i18n issue. Selecting a results type from the Results dropdown will show the following information for each issue:

  • the status of the issue
  • the prediction of the issue
  • the source file in which the issue was found
  • the line number of the issue
  • the actual issue
  • the complete code line in which the issue was found
  • the reason for the issue

You can sort, search, and filter issues, and change the prediction. In addition, you can select and highlight issues directly in the Editor Area by double-clicking on a row in the table.

Sharing Scan Results

Globalyzer supports sharing your project and scan results through import/export and reporting features, as well as its Shared Project feature, allowing visibility and collaboration during your i18n efforts.

For information on Shared Projects, click here.

Fixing Source Code

Finally, Globalyzer provides several convenient ways for you to fix the internationalization issues it discovers in your code. These methods include:

Directly editing source code -- Using the Scan Results table, you can jump directly to the associated source file opened in the Editor Area. At that point, you can edit your source code or insert comments for later consideration. For information on modifying files from within Globalyzer, click here.

Changing the Prediction in the Scan Results Table -- Changing the prediction of rows in the Scan Results table allows you to filter issues without changing the underlying Rule Set. These custom predictions settings will stick as long as the associated Rule Set is not modified and the source file is not significantly modified. Reports, by default, do not include issues with certain predictions.

Externalizing embedded text -- Globalyzer's convenient String Externalization feature lets you automatically replace embedded text (such as a hardcoded button label) with a method call to retrieve the text from a resource file. For more information on externalizing text, click here.

Externalizing and editing embedded text -- Globalyzer provides a convenient mechanism for editing display text before it is externalized. This feature lets you easily work with concatenated strings that contain variables. For more information on externalizing and editing, click here.

Externalizing multiple strings -- Globalyzer provides a "batch processing" feature that lets you externalize multiple embedded text strings in one operation. For more information on externalizing multiple strings, click here.

Commenting code -- As part of the "fixing" features, Globalyzer provides convenient methods for adding meaningful comments to code. The comment types include "to do" comments, "ignore" comments, and comments that note the location and contents of externalized strings. For more information on comments, click here.

What is in this User's Guide?

The Globalyzer User's Guide describes how to use Globalyzer to scan, assess, and internationalize your source code. The guide addresses these topics:

Getting Started

Configuring Rule Sets

Scanning Source Code

Fixing Internationalization Issues in Source Code

Where to Find More Information

For a general introduction to internationalization (i18n), see Internationalization Basics.

The document, Locale-Sensitive Methods, addresses internationalization issues for specific methods in C#, C/C++, Delphi, Java, Perl, SQL, and Visual Basic.

For basic information on Regular Expressions, click here.

 User's Guide Contents