To use NLS, The National Language Support for International Computing 7.6 documentation says to create multiple master files -- one for each language of your user community.

This requires that you know the languages. We have customers in over 100 countries, so that approach is impractical. Plus, how do you accommodate different alphabets, such as Japanese?

How do you create reports with headings and column titles that dynamically change? We're looking to have a list box on the launch page where the user could select the language.

Thank you,

John

This message has been edited. Last edited by: JohnB,

John, that would be the purpose of having multiple master files.
the fexes could reference the fieldnames by alias, the fieldname and/or the 'title' field can be in another language.
If user selects 'FRENCH'
then your fex
USE
myapp/mydata.foc AS mydata_fr
END
and you've invoked the FRENCH version of the master.
If your fexes are more complex, then you'll need your own translation table so that your
AS somenewname phrases can be xlated.
The NLS selection is going to give you webfocus reserve words, error messages, dashboard instructions,'Welcome to WebFOCUS' phrases, etc, in that language. Its not going to do your content xlation for you, which i'm sure makes sense to you. As for the japanese bits, i'll defer to wiser colleagues, sure to come along any minute now.

I think that using the Masters for column titles is a simplistic view on NLS.

There are time where the columns data may have a different meaning in one report to another, and therefore a different title.

Then you have Computes and Defines.

I think to do this properly you would have to cater for custom titles, headings, etc, probably with -INCLUDEs. A lot of work, but safer.

But in the later (76) versions you could use the master file to provide the various languages titles and descriptions. You can enter them using the keyword TITLE_xx= and DESCRIPTION_xx= (xx here is the language code). You select which title is displayed with SET LANGUAGE=xx.

ahhh. that's cool!

Still does not overcome the situation when you have computes and defines

However using SET HOLDATTR=ON does propogate the correct title to hold files.

quote:

how do you accommodate different alphabets, such as Japanese?

The short answer is Unicode and a unicode capable text editor. Note, that Dev Studio currnetly doesn't play well with non-ascii character sets.

The long answer is character sets relevant to the target audience, but this gets really ugly when you are talking more than 2 or 3 charsets - better off sticking with unicode.

Getting the right labels etc for the language is best done by a fluent speaker/reader of the language. Although there are web based tools for doing translations they can lead to nonsensical or culturally inappropriate mishaps.

Cheers

Stu

Hello All,

I have a report which has source master file consist of chinease and Japanease characters. When I run the report output is not what I have coming from source. I have set NLS property to UTF-8 at WebFocus Application Server level and WebFocus Administration Console level resp still the problem persist.Plese share if you came across such a scenario. I just wanted to read the characters coming from soure no matter what is in source?

Regards,
Hemant

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Hemant,

Hemant,

This would be good for you to open a new thread on as your question is about showing characters, where JohnB's was about handling translations.

As for your question though, I have come across something similar recently. Spanish characters were not showing properly so I verified that I had my client and Reporting server set properly (137 Client/1252 Reporting Server) after a frustrating night I came in the next morning and started verifying the NLS settings from the DB on up. We utilize Oracle here and I verified that it was set to UTF-8 which it was. We then figured out that the Oracle client on our reporting server wasn't set with the correct language codepage so we updated the NLS_LANG variable to American.America.WE8msWIN1252. That resolved our issue.

As far as I can tell the places that you want to validate are your DB, the DB Client on your Reporting Server, TomCat, The reporting Server, and WebFOCUS Client. If all of these are setup as desired and you are still having issues, I would open a case with IBI.