Question

I am enabling internationalization for my RCP application. The preferences tab allows the user to select between languages. I understand that Eclipse (3.7) has to load the language at start-up and can not dynamically change languages.

I know of three approaches to accomplish this:
1) Modify the OS level shortcut to pass in -nl XX
2) Change the app.ini file to have -nl XX (on separate lines)
3) Change the config.ini to have osgi.nl = XX

The issue with these approaches is that they all require write permission to the application directory. When running under Vista / Windows 7 and Linux implementations that do not provide write access to programs, a normal user does not have permissions to modify these files.

Is there another approach to pass in arguments that change the VM language? Is there a workaround for the file protection provided by the OS?

Answer 1

In Windows the application directory is write-protected for a good reason. Fortunately one can set Eclipse Runtime Options to configure where the RCP application should store

• configuration data
• workspace data

This can be accomplished in two ways:

• setting command line arguments (-configuration , -data)
• defining system properties (osgi.configuration.area to , osgi.instance.area to ) for example in config.ini

For further information see Runtime Options in official Eclipse Help.

In Windows such data should be stored in the user directory.
By the way you should be able to locate these settings in the Installation Details pane of the standard About dialog.

However setting these properties is a bit tricky. In my case the application installer evaluates the location of the user directory at installation time and modifies the config.ini file accordingly.