The lowest level represents the largest geographic area within a country with common time and language characteristics. This hierarchy allows for distinctions between, for example, the various time zones in the United States, or the French-speaking and German-speaking regions of Switzerland.

NOTE The CommonPoint application system will not provide locales at a finer level of granularity, such as a state, city, or area code region.

This hierarchical approach allows you to store only the information you need at each level. For example, many items need to be localized only at the English-speaking level rather than a country or time zone level.

Locales at the lower levels effectively inherit items in higher level locales. This mechanism is transparent to the user. If a user calls an object that doesn't exist in the current locale, the locale hierarchy is traversed upward until an appropriate object is found. For example, if a currency format is stored in the United States locale, it also appears to users in the Pacific Standard Time Zone and Central Standard Time Zone locales. This mechanism allows a single copy of an object to be stored in the locale where it can be used by the most users.

Objects in sublocales override the same object if it exists in higher locales. For example, the United States locale might contain a calendar object that knows when to make a switch to daylight savings time. A state that doesn't use daylight savings, such as Hawaii, would have a locale containing a special calendar object. This object would override the calendar in the United States locale.