Internationalisation and Localisation

When configuring client items in Weave it's possible to set the text displayed to the user for various items directly, this is generally done by setting a 'label', 'text' or 'tooltip' type of properties for the items.

Previously when these values were set they would completely replace the value displayed for every user, however version 2.4.7 of Weave introduced a way to set these values indirectly and have a different value provided to the user based on their location.

The actual values to be displayed to the users are set in a separate client resources configuration item, where you outline the text to be displayed to the user and give each piece of text a unique id, then reference that id where previously you'd use the text directly.

Referencing the text item is performed by prefixing the texts id with % where you'd usually put the text, for example

	<view id="com.cohga.html.client.main.searchView">
		<label>Search</label>
		<location>west</location>
	</view>

would be become

	<view id="com.cohga.html.client.main.searchView">
		<label>%search.label</label>
		<location>west</location>
	</view>

To actually define the text to be used you need to create a separate client resources item

<client:resources>
	<resource id="search.label">Search</resource>
</client:resources>

The above example is intended to show the syntax required to configure text for localisation, and in itself hasn't really provided us with any advantage, since all we've done here is to replace the default text displayed for every client and that would've been easier just to replace the text directly.

However, the real point here is to allow the text to be changed for each user based on their preferred language, and the way we do that it to create another client resources item that contains the alternate text and specify what locale the user should ask for for that text to be used. To do this we duplicate the existing resources item and set a lang property for the resources, for example:

<client:resources lang="sv">
	<resource id="search.label">Hitta</resource>
</client:resources>

<client:resources lang="ru">
	<resource id="search.label">находить</resource>
</client:resources>

Here we've set alternate values for the search label for Swedish and Russian users, with no change required to the configuration for the search panel and nothing required from the user.

Alternate configuration layout
If you need to set a lot of resources it can become quite verbose to set each item with a separate resource entry in a resources item, so as an alternative way of creating resources you can build fullstop separated items by nesting tags, for example

<client:resources>
	<search>
		<label>Search</label>
		<tooltip>
			<title>Search</title>
			<text>Search for an entity</text>
		<tooltip>
	</search>
</client:resources>

This will define search.label, search.tooltip.title and search.tooltip.text

Some default resources
The following resources are defined by default within Weave and will be used internally to represent these values.
Setting them in a resources item will allow you to change these values where ever they're used within Weave.

Locale override

As of Weave 2.4.11 the user browser local can be specified by adding a 'locale' parameter to the startup url. If this is not set then the browsers default locale will be used to determine any language resources to load.

e.g. http://server:8080/weave/main.html?locale=sv
or http://server:8080/weave/index.html?locale=en_AU

Resource property files

Version 2.15.8 of the com.cohga.client.weave bundles adds support for resources defined in external properties files, rather than just in <resources> tags in config files.

All .properties files in a 'i18n' directory under the 'workspace' directory will be processed for loading of resources. The format of the files should follow the standard Java properties file format, e.g. each line should be of the format 'name=value'

If file name include an underscore, '_', in the base name then the characters after the underscore will be the locale for the resources, the part of the name before the underscore is ignored. e.g. test_sv.properties will contain Swedish resources. No underscore means no locale for the resources so they'll be used as default values.

Finally, it's possible to zip up the contents of the i18n directory and have that used instead of the i18n directory itself.