Error numbers for exceptions

Question

We start to use error numbers for the exceptions.
If a user gets a error he can tell the error number to the help desk.
The messages are quite like the ones from Oracle: "ORA-02449:
unique/primary keys in table referenced by foreign keys"
We have multilingual users. Maybe its too much to expect from them to read an English message and tell it the help desk man. So we have numbers.
But these numbers need to be organized, guide lines have to be written and obeyed for this. I don't see the benefit of these error codes.
Besides this, Java doesn't seem to provide this feature, so it seems to be unimportant or at most "nice to have".
What do you think about it?

Answer 1

The ResourceBundle stuff is there to support applications.in multiple languages. On the basis of an error code or some other token (key) the program can pick the appropriate error message. (Not that as if you could not do it yourself.)
java.util.ResourceBundle
java.util.PropertyResourceBundleThe applications I write are either in one-language or the several languages are supported through other means (separate Velocity templates and the like), but out of curiosity I transformed a little pure Java hobby application to support several languages with the help of this ResourceBundle stuff and it worked fine.
I put the propertiy files into the jar containing the application:
thw.properties thw_fr.properties thw_ge.properties thw_hu.properties
    final static ResourceBundle bundle = getBundle("thw");
    static ResourceBundle getBundle(String name) {
     String language     =System.getProperty("language");
     String country     =System.getProperty("country");
     String variant     =System.getProperty("variant");
     java.util.Locale locale = null;
     try     {
          locale=new java.util.Locale(language);
          if (DEBUG) System.out.println(locale);
          locale=new java.util.Locale(language,country);
          if (DEBUG) System.out.println(locale);
          locale=new java.util.Locale(language,country,variant);
          if (DEBUG) System.out.println(locale);
     catch (Exception e) {
     if (locale==null) return ResourceBundle.getBundle(name);
     return ResourceBundle.getBundle(name,locale);
    public static String getString(String name)  {
     return bundle.getString(name);
        JPanel tmpp=new JPanel();
        tmpp.setLayout(new GridLayout(ROWS,COLS));
        tmpp.add(new JLabel(getString("col_count")));
///...