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About Developing Multilingual Reports

This section describes how extracting user-visible strings automatically from report design and Siebel report libraries can greatly simplify the localization process, reduce the time to create translations, and lower the localization cost. You need not be familiar with Actuate e.Report Designer Professional. The externalized strings of the reports can be translated and maintained separately without affecting the report design and the executable file.

New functions to export and import user interface strings have been implemented in sscustom.bas. When the report is first designed and run in the Design mode, all the control names, text strings, and certain user interface properties from the report are extracted to an external file. This external file is in plain text format and is referred to as an user interface file. You can then localize the text strings in this file. When the report is run in the Deployment mode (which is the mode in which report executables are deployed), the report will read the text strings from this user interface file.

Previously, to translate user-visible strings in a report, you would manually open each report design file and modify the properties of the label controls, text controls, and so on. With this user interface externalization feature, you will be able to translate the texts for label controls and the search alias for text controls in the user interface files that are created by the user interface externalization feature.

NOTE:  When creating multilingual reports, the text file contains only translations for the label controls. When report data has changed, you do not need to copy anything back to or add anything to the text file. The only time you will need to add an entry in the text file is when you have added a new label control in the design, and you need to provide the language translation.