Letter Picker Controls: Your Take

Quite often I see user controls or custom server controls which display every letter of an alphabet. For example, you click K and get a list of, say users, whose last name starts with a K. It’s very handy… except that I see a few problems with this approach and want to pick your brain on this.

Most letter picker controls I’ve seen display English letters. If an ASP.NET thread runs under a German locale you’re still stuck with only English letters. This is not too user friendly. I also prefer to stay away from non-localizable solutions.

I believe it’s possible to get our hands on every alphabet out there and display the right set of characters based on the thread locale. However, it’s not a reasonable thing to do if a character set contains far more than thirty-something characters.

In Japanese, last names are written either in katakana or kanji (correct me if I’m wrong). You wouldn’t want to display several thousand kanji. Besides, they are far more complex than English letters.

My question of the day is: has anyone implemented this kind of user/custom control that nicely handles Asian languages too?

I haven't done it.

The problem screams Unicode at me though.

For implementation I suggest being prepared to handle numeric (as opposed to named) code points. If you need one font on an "all cultures" web interface there are some issues. Fonts that claim to cover a lot of the glyphs are few and may be imperfect. One of the best efforts is an Arial that MS put together, there is also a bitstream font. (I've noticed that some of the "unicode" fonts have "unexpected" handling of some glyphs.)

Judging by related experience, you might need to roll some of your own, to get what you really want.

I would like to implement this user comtrol in my project.