Symbolic strings are an object type in the Siebel Repository. We can understand how symbolic strings support the multi-language capabilities of Siebel CRM by looking at the following example:

Every list or form applet in a Siebel application exposes a button with the text Query as its caption. There are thousands of applets, and therefore thousands of instances of the Query button control, in the repository.

Let us imagine that our customer wishes to change the caption text from Query to Search.

If the caption was stored along with each individual button definition, a developer would have to check out and manipulate thousands of objects. To avoid this time-consuming and error-prone effort, each object that displays a text in the user interface references a Symbolic String definition. The following diagram illustrates this:

We can observe that each query button references the same symbolic string that contains the text for each supported language (American English...