I am working on the I18n of our java application and we have decided that we will only support data in one locale whereas the user interface may support many.
My question is this:
Should sorting and filtering of data be performed using the user’s locale or the data’s?
Orginally we had assumed it made sense to sort according to data’s locale but having read articles like the one below it seems to make more sense to sort by the user’s.
“Sorts can also vary depending on the fundamental order the language and culture use for the alphabet. For example, the Swedish language has an “Ä” character that it sorts after “Z” in the alphabet. The German language also has this character, but sorts it like “ae”, after “A” in the alphabet.” http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/a7zyyk0c.aspx
Has anyone had to make this decision before? What did you decide? Opinions?
Can anyone think of examples that require the use of the data’s locale for sorting or filtering?
Thanks in advance.
I guess it’ll have to depend on the use-cases, i.e. what helps the users the most?
If you’re an American working with Swedish names, and Swedish people, it’d really help you to view the data sorted using Swedish rules, since that is what most people you’re interacting with would expect.