| General |
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| RB Manager |
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| RB Reporter |
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Setting Your Personal Preferences
Getting Started
Before you can do anything with the program, of course, you have to get it running. RB Manager is purely a Java application. The download does not come with a Java runtime environment. In order to use RBManager, you will need to hava a Java runtime environment installed on your machine. The environment is available to most computing platforms at Sun's internet site. RB Manager has been tested for Java versions 1.2.2 and higher. It is recommended that you use Java version 1.3 if it is available for your system.
To run the program from the command line, first go to the RBManager directory on your system, then enter:
java -classpath ./lib/RBManager.jar;./lib/xerces.jar com.ibm.rbm.RBManager
Alternatively, Windows users can use the batch file, RBManager.bat to accomplish the same thing. Linux and Unix users tend not to need their hands held, and can probably figure out how to write a simple script or alias to run the application without help. Mac OS X users can run the program from the Terminal application with the above command line, substituting a colon for the semi-colon in the classpath argument.
The Display
Once you get the application running, you will hopefully see something like this:
The display may differ because of differences in the various Java Virtual Machines and differences in Look and Feels. At the top is a menu bar and a logo. Below the logo and to the left is a pane in which all of the various language files will be listed in a tree view. Since no resource bundle has been selected, this tree is currently empty. To the right is a tabbed pane in which three views will be shown. The views will either present information or provide an interface for editing the various data contained across your resource bundle.
Customizing the Application for You
Go to the Options menu and select Preferences. The first time after opening the application, it may take a few seconds to get to the preferences as the application tries to get information from your virtual machine.A dialog box should appear that looks similar to this:
The first thing to do is to change the user name to your own name. You will only have to do this once unless someone else uses this application and changes the name. Second, you should change the look and feel of the application to your preference. All of the look and feels that your JVM supports should be listed in the drop down box. (Note that changes will not take affect until after you are done and have pressed the Update button).
The last thing to change is the locale you would like to use to work with this application. When you download RBManager, it is set by default to display in U.S. English. As of this writing, you can use the program in Finnish, Swedish, and German as well. Three lists choices are possible for selecting a locale. The first, called 'Machine Supported', lists all of the locals supported by your JVM. The second, called 'Defined for RBManager', analyzes the Resource Bundle for RBManager and lets you select from the available translation files. The third option, called 'ISO Standards', lists all of the language and country 2-letter codes defined by the ISO. You may select any of the three options by use of the radio button on the left and then select the encoding you would like to use. Of course if the encoding you select is not supported by RBManager, the translations in the base class of the bundle will be used, which are in English. Also note, that the base class language may not appear in the 'Defined for RBManager' section because the encoding is not always specified for that file.
When you are done making your personalized selections, click on the Update button. The preferences will be saved in a file called preferences.properties stored in your RBManager directory. You will not need to make these selections in the future, unless you want to change your defaul options.