NotesInternational: Stop Hard-Coding Date Separators and Currency Symbols

You write an agent that formats a date as month & "/" & day & "/" & year, test it on your machine, and it’s fine. Then it runs on a server configured for a European locale where dates read day-first, or a customer copies it to a host where the decimal separator is a comma — and suddenly “01/02” means the wrong day and your currency totals look wrong.

The fix isn’t to guess. Domino already knows the regional settings of the machine the code is running on, and exposes them through NotesInternational. It’s a small, read-only class — but it’s the difference between locale-correct output and code that only works on the developer’s laptop.

TL;DR

• session.International returns a read-only NotesInternational — a live view of the host OS’s regional settings.
• It reflects the machine the code runs on: a scheduled agent reads the server’s settings, client code reads the client’s. It is not the remote browser’s locale in a web app.
• Date order is exposed as three booleans — IsDateDMY / IsDateMDY / IsDateYMD — plus the DateSep / TimeSep separators, so you can build a correct pattern instead of hard-coding / and :.
• Currency and number formatting: CurrencySymbol, CurrencyDigits, DecimalSep, ThousandsSep, IsCurrencySuffix, IsCurrencySpace, IsCurrencyZero.
• TimeZone uses the classic Notes convention — positive means west of GMT (Eastern Standard Time is 5, not -5), and the docs hedge that it isn’t a clean signed offset for every zone.
• The class has no methods — it’s pure properties. Use it to interpret or format NotesDateTime values, not to change anything.

Getting the object

NotesInternational is contained by NotesSession — there’s no constructor, you read it off the session:

Dim session As New NotesSession
Dim intl As NotesInternational
Set intl = session.International

The class description is explicit about how live it is:

“Represents the international settings in the operating environment, for example, the Windows Control Panel international settings. When any of these settings is changed in the operating environment, Domino recognizes the new settings immediately.”

So you don’t cache it across a long-running process expecting a frozen snapshot — read it when you need it.

What it exposes

Every property is read-only. The useful ones fall into four groups.

Date and time shape

Numbers and currency

Time zone and DST

Locale words: Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday give the localized relative-day terms Notes uses in views.

A worked example

This agent reads several settings and builds a date pattern matching the host locale’s order — no hard-coded / or MDY assumption:

Sub Initialize
  Dim session As New NotesSession
  Dim intl As NotesInternational
  Set intl = session.International

  ' Report the formatting exceptions vs a US-default baseline
  Dim msg As String
  If intl.CurrencySymbol <> "$" Then
    msg = "Currency symbol is " & intl.CurrencySymbol
  End If
  If intl.DecimalSep <> "." Then
    If msg <> "" Then msg = msg & Chr(10)
    msg = msg & "Decimal separator is " & intl.DecimalSep
  End If
  If intl.IsTime24Hour Then
    If msg <> "" Then msg = msg & Chr(10)
    msg = msg & "Time is 24-hour"
  End If
  If msg = "" Then msg = "Locale matches the US default"
  Print msg

  ' Build a date pattern that matches the locale's actual order
  Dim pattern As String
  If intl.IsDateDMY Then
    pattern = "DD" & intl.DateSep & "MM" & intl.DateSep & "YYYY"
  ElseIf intl.IsDateMDY Then
    pattern = "MM" & intl.DateSep & "DD" & intl.DateSep & "YYYY"
  ElseIf intl.IsDateYMD Then
    pattern = "YYYY" & intl.DateSep & "MM" & intl.DateSep & "DD"
  End If
  Print "Locale date pattern: " & pattern
End Sub

The first block is adapted from the official class example; the AM/PM example shows the same read pattern for the time strings, and the date-order detection is the practical payoff — you now know whether to parse 01/02/2026 as January 2nd or February 1st.

Three traps

1. It’s the host’s settings, not the user’s. This is the one that surprises people. In a scheduled agent, session.International reads the server’s regional settings. In client-side code it reads the client’s. A web application rendering for a remote browser does not get that browser’s locale this way — for true per-request locale in a web app you read the HTTP Accept-Language header yourself.

2. It’s read-only. There are no setters and no methods at all — you can only read what the OS reports. To change formatting you change the OS regional settings (or build the string yourself from these values).

3. TimeZone sign is the classic Notes convention. It’s an integer where, per the docs, the value “indicates the number of hours which must be added to the time to get Greenwich Mean Time” — so positive is west of GMT: GMT is 0, US Eastern Standard Time is 5, not -5. The docs add “in many cases, but not all” — don’t treat it as a clean signed offset for every zone, especially across DST and half-hour zones.

Pairing with NotesDateTime

NotesInternational tells you how the locale formats date-times; NotesDateTime holds the actual values. Use the former to interpret or display the latter — read DateSep and the IsDateXYZ flags to build a correct display or parse string, rather than hard-coding separators and order. The two are complementary: one is the format rules, the other is the data.

What about Java and SSJS?

The surface is consistent across all three — the same read-only locale properties. In Java and SSJS the property accessors are getDateSep(), getCurrencySymbol(), isDateDMY() and so on, but the values and the host-OS semantics carry over unchanged.

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