I have a lot of hardcoded strings in a large application, and I need to know which strings are front-end (visible in the GUI), and which are back-end (i.e. sorting parameters) so I can edit them accordingly.
Is there any easy way to tell the difference? At the moment, I have to decide between doing everything the safe way but wasting a bunch of time, or saving time but running the risk that the application won’t work the way I want it to.
Edit: The application is mostly form-based. By strings I mean anything in the code that is literally a string. Some are obviously meant for the user, such as error messages, but some are not so obvious, such as “customer”. I don’t know if “customer” is something that pops up on a dialog box somewhere or if it’s something totally internal.
No. There is no easy way.
My Suggestion: You could start by writing some scripts to detect strings consumed by dialogs/ux/console and fix these. Then you should exclude things like traces/logging etc. If you find further patters use those to finally end up with a smaller subset of items that you would have to manually prune out.
This mess is difficult to clean up, especially so for a larger application.