Simon Willison’s Weblog

Message Catalog definition

Here’s something I picked up on the Sigia-l mailing list the other day, courtesy of Patrick Hunt (reproduced with permission):

[A Message Catalog is...] A database of inline error, exception, informational and instructional messages that can be dynamically called to a page-level message component based on user ID, role, system/object state or some other parameter. Allows messages to be re-used as appropriate and dynamically generated rather than hard-coded. In addition to typical error messaging, such a system can be tied to personalization, upsell/cross-sell, etc. The IA would conceivably be involved, at a minimum, in determining message types and identifying pages that require messages.