[icu-support] Preserving Collator Information

[Grant B. <gra...@gm...>]

I would like some advice on how to reconstruct a collator from stored
configuration information. I want to provide a way for an
administrator to set up a collation configuration and have my
application normalize and record it so that it gets the same collation
order each time it runs.

I tried using the short definition strings, taking the configuration
name and passing it through the following steps to arrive at the
correct short definition name.

- ucol_normalizeShortDefinitionString
- ucol_openFromShortString
- ucol_getShortDefinitionString

However, when I do this (ICU 3.0 BTW) to the short definition
VPHONEBOOK_LDE, I get KPHONEBOOK_LDE as the final string. However, if
I start with KPHONEBOOK_LDE, as would be the case if I stored the
previous collator config, I get LDE as the result. To me this appears
to be inconsistent.

What is the best approach to record the collator configuration so that
the correct collation can be reconstituted?

-- Grant