We are moving from our legacy reporting platform to WebFOCUS. We already have our data and report column headers (metadata) localized, and need to support localization in WebFOCUS reports. The Help topic "Multilingual Metadata" talks about TITLE_EN, TITLE_FR, TITLE_ES etc. But we don't want to manually put the translated column headers in the .mas master file ... that would be a lot of work, error prone, and hard to maintain.
So we tried putting &&ColumnName1, &&ColumnName2 etc. in the TITLE_NL attribute of each FIELDNAME,

and

> put "VARIABLE NAME=&&ColumnName1, USAGE=A255V, $" at the top of the master file,
> made sure the global variables &&ColumnName1 etc. were getting the right values from the database given the locale,
> SET LANG = NL

and it works: We can set the LOCALE and we get the column headers in the proper language!

Is this a valid approach? Or are we using an undocumented feature that accidentally works, for now?
With LANG = NL we obviously get all WebFOCUS error messages in Dutch, which is unfortunate for my colleagues who never learned this language .

And if it's valid, why doesn't it work for TITLE or TITLE_EN? Weird! With TITLE='&&ColumnName1' or TITLE_EN='&&ColumnName1' etc. the HTML page keeps prompting for Parameters WITHOUT NAMING ANY. Is this a bug?

Groeten,
Marc Schluper

I am happy to add that with the installation of Report Server 8.0.0.1m Build 7.0.9 the weird behavior (of TITLE='&&ColumnName1' not being supported in this scenario whereas TITLE_NL='&&ColumnName2' is) went away.

So the only question is: is this a supported method or an undocumented trick?