CiviCRM CJK capability

[i-sako]

Hello, everyone.

Please pardon a question from someone who is not yet a CiviCRM user, but I am curious about how well CiviCRM handles Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, particularly with respect to searches conducted by site users in those languages. I am asking in part because I am now seeking developers to provide professional services for a Tokyo-based NPO (please see the RFP post at the URL below if interested), and the project requires flawless CJK support.

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,12153.0.html

I would imagine that these languages should be no problem, but am I correct in that assumption? Please let me know.

Thank you,

Patrick Eaton
http://jat.org

[Donald Lobo]

i assume it works ok, since we have some folks in taiwan using it:

http://civicrm.org/node/652

i've requested charles to post a more detailed response to this

lobo

[Piotr Szotkowski]

I’m not very good at the technicalities behind how CJK characters are represented in UTF-8, but assuming the representation is consistent, then I don’t see any show-stoppers – CiviCRM is in UTF-8 from grounds up.

The only problem I can think of if the same characters are represented in various ways (e.g., a single character can be represented either as X or as Y plus a combining character Z), but I hope it’s not a common problem in CJK (it’s quite rare in Central- and Easter-European characters).

[Donald Lobo]

might also want to check this post out: http://civicrm.org/node/252

we heard that they were using it for the japanese defense services

lobo

[charlesc]

Hi all,

We don't have full testing on CiviCRM 3.x about l10n in Chinese. Some basic search does work for me, but sometimes we need care about specific situation, such as full name sorting in Chinese is different than in English. Fo example, if we search lastname+firstname without comma, we cant find anything. (But in fact, "ChuangCharles" is the format we use, not "Chuang, Charles" or "Charles Chuang")

Any suggestion?

[Piotr Szotkowski]

You can try changing the rules CiviCRM uses to create the civicrm_contact.display_name entries and (once this column is refreshed for all of the contacts) see whether the search works.

[eggtart]

Where should I go to change the rules for {contact.display_name}?

Thanks!

[Donald Lobo]

The easiest place is to probably do this as a mysql trigger on your database. Note that you need super user privileges on your mysql DB in 5.0.x

if you do write a mysql trigger, please publish your code so others can benefit

at some point, we might want to make both the display_name and sort_name hookable so modules can change the behavior if needed

lobo

[Piotr Szotkowski]

at some point, we might want to make both the display_name and sort_name hookable so modules can change the behavior if needed

…or make them virtual columns (view columns) built on-the-fly by MySQL. Perhaps harder to make hookable then, though (at the benefit of not having to handle regeneration on the PHP side).

[eggtart]

I have tried changing the logic in Individual.php, and it seems to work.

Thanks