Whether a Domino site is composed of several unilingual databases or a single multilingual database, it can be synchronized using the Domino Designer 6 and Domino Global WorkBench to handle the creation and management of documents across languages.
To understand synchronization, it helps to first think about replication. In a traditional Notes database -- one that is developed to be used in just one language -- each document that is created has a unique ID (UNID), and that UNID is maintained for all replicas of the document. So if a change is made in one replica of a document, the replication process ensures that the change is replicated to all the documents with that UNID -- across all replicas of the database. The replication process, however, creates special challenges for multilingual sites. In a multilingual site, when a document is created in the Turkish version of the database and then translated into English, French, and German, each version of the document in those other languages must have its own UNID. Otherwise, if those documents were to share the same UNID, when the database is replicated, any changes in the Turkish document would cause the English, French, and German versions of the document to be overwritten by the Turkish version. The Domino Global WorkBench Synchronizer manages the process of updating translated versions when the original changes.
The Synchronizer synchronizes both unilingual and multilingual documents in localized databases. In a synchronized database, whenever a document is created or changed in one language, the addition or change can be automatically flagged for translation in the companion languages. Synchronization goes beyond replication by allowing documents with different UNIDs to be linked with each other across languages, across servers, and across databases. Since all synchronized documents can still have a unique ID, synchronization does not interfere with replication; rather, synchronization is complementary to the replication process. Documents with different UNIDs know about each other by means of a new ID field. The field is created by a hidden subform; DGW adds the subform to the forms in a synchronized database. Each document that is to be translated has one. |
