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Complex field patterns

In addition to defining simple patterns for date/time fields, numeric fields, and text fields, you can define a locale-specific pattern or handle variable patterns.

Locale-specific patterns

If you want to force a locale on a pattern, regardless of the locale that has already been assigned to an object, you can define a locale-specific pattern. The syntax of a locale-specific pattern is defined as follows:

category_name(locale_name){pattern}

where

•	category_name can be date, time, num, or text.

•	locale_name is identified by a language and/or country or region code, as defined in RFC 1766 (Tags for the Identification of Languages, 1995).

•	pattern is the simple pattern for processing values.

For example, to force a date/time field to translate a date into the French language according to France’s country code, you would define the pattern as follows:

date(fr_FR){DD MMMM, YYYY}

Variable patterns

In cases where the user input or bound data is available in more than one format (for example, telephone numbers may or may not have a three-digit area code), you can define a pattern that accounts for the differences. The syntax for defining a number of acceptable patterns is as follows:

category_name{pattern}|category_name{pattern}|category_name{pattern}

where each pattern is separated by a vertical bar (|). You can specify an unlimited number of patterns. For example, the following construct handles two different text patterns:

text{999*9999}|text{999*999*9999}

See also 

Simple patterns

Complex field patterns