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ating successful software for worldwide use requires attention to locale details ranging from date and time to numeric formatting. |
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| Any currency amount has at least two primary components: the currency symbol (such as $, or the ISO 4217 three letter code such as USD), and the amount (such as 143.25). In the past, it was assumed that each application would only support one currency, the local one, and the the local currency symbol was hardcoded into the application. As the Internet erased national and geographical boundaries, the concept of doing business within a single country quickly gave way to the need to compete in an international marketplace, and localized currency support became critical. A bad implementation could lead to business disaster--think about an e-business application that sells books automatically changing just the currency symbol based on the user's country/language. A book sold in France for 50 Euros would suddenly be worth 50 yens in Japan, or 50 dollars in the US. Your bottom line could quickly suffer. To see an example of correct currency support, look at our Global BookStore demo.
When developing e-business applications, monetary amounts and currency symbols need to to support the business needs of your organization. A few questions will have to be asked:
- What countries are you doing business with?
- What new markets are your trying to reach?
- Are you going to display prices in the local currency or the currency from the original country?
- Are you going to provide conversion tools between currencies to give an estimate?
- Are you going to display multiple currencies on the same page?
Only after these questions are answered can you start coding.
Different countries express monetary values in different ways. The same rules that are used for number formatting will be apply, but there will be some added variations. |
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Continue to "Currency: Formats and symbols"
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