I have a web application which includes a method which displays tables
(or more often views) which can be sorted and filtered in various ways
by the user. In the case of dates, I provide two columns (typically
called "usr_time" and "time") where "time" is the underlying timestatmp
and "usr_time" is formatted by an external function (TimeFormat) to a
format like "17-Oct-2012 at 15:25".
For example, I have a view defined like this:
CREATE VIEW user_history_log AS
SELECT TimeFormat(time) AS usr_time,
facility,
event,
details,
time,
username
FROM system_log;
The user can filter the output so that only dates containing a substring
like "Oct" will be displayed (using the usr_time column) or sorted (in
which case the "usr_" prefix is noted and stripped off to give the name
of the underlying column so that the date column will be sorted
chronologically rather than alphabetically). The underlying query used
to display the table might be something like
SELECT usr_time,facility,event,details
FROM user_history_log
WHERE username='FOO' AND usr_time LIKE '%oct%'
ORDER BY time DESC;
A problem has arisen in connection with internationalisation. The user
can now select a preferred language, which is fine except for the dates
displayed in the tables. The external TimeFormat function that does the
formatting is of course declared static, so it has no idea who the user
is or what the preferred language is. So I either have to use English
for displaying dates regardless of the chosen language, or not use
TimeFormat so that the user can't filter the output as before, or find
some way of passing a locale code to TimeFormat by some devious trick.
Only the last of these three seems acceptable, but I haven't been able
to come up with the devious trick I need. Can anyone help?
TIA,
--
John English
