C Localizing Oracle Business Intelligence Deployments

Oracle Business Intelligence is designed to allow users to dynamically change their preferred language and locale preferences. This chapter contains the following topics on how to configure Oracle Business Intelligence Applications for deployment in one or more language environments besides English:

• Process of Maintaining Translation Tables for Oracle BI

• About Translating Presentation Services Strings

• Changing the Default Currency in Analytics Applications

Process of Maintaining Translation Tables for Oracle BI

The Oracle Business Intelligence Presentation layer supports multiple translations for any column name. When working with Oracle BI Answers or rendering a dashboard, users see their local language strings in their reports. For example, English-speaking and French-speaking users would see their local language strings in their reports. There are two kinds of application strings requiring translation in Oracle Business Intelligence:

• Metadata

  Metadata strings are Analytics-created objects in the Oracle Business Intelligence repository such as Subject Area, Metrics, and Dimensions.

• Presentation Services

  Presentation Services objects are end-user created objects such as Reports, Dashboards, and Pages. Translations for Presentation Services strings are stored in the captions.xml file. For more information on accessing these strings and changing the translations, see Oracle Business Intelligence Presentation Services Administration Guide.

This process includes the following tasks:

• Upgrading Oracle Business Intelligence Seed Data for Non-English Locales

• Externalizing Customer Metadata Strings

• Adding Custom Translations to the W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G Table

Upgrading Oracle Business Intelligence Seed Data for Non-English Locales

If Oracle Business Intelligence data in your deployment is to be viewed in a language other than English, you must also import Locale seed data into a data warehouse table called W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G. This process must be performed once for each language the application users might select to run their web client.

During the Oracle Business Intelligence installation, a folder named $INSTALLDIR\SeedData was created, which contains a sub folder for each language. Within each language sub folder is a .dat file (the data to be imported) and an .inp file (the WHERE clause governing the import).

Importing Locale Seed Data Into The Translation Table (W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G)

If the primary language being used is not English, you may have to import additional locale seed data (depending on the number of languages you use) as shown in the following procedures.

Note:

This procedure can be performed only by a BI Administrator.

To verify creation of Translation Table (W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G) and corresponding indexes:

1. Verify that in the setting up of the Business Analytics Warehouse, tables included the creation of the W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G table (see page 105, Process of Creating Data Warehouse Tables).

2. Lookup the definitions of the indexes in the DAC and create them manually in the Business Analytics Warehouse. The names of the indexes are as follows:

   • W_LOCAL_STRING_G_U1

   • W_LOCAL_STRING_G_P1

   • W_LOCAL_STRING_G_M1

   • W_LOCAL_STRING_G_M2

Note: It is better to add these indexes to W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G prior to importing the locale seed data in the next section, in order to safeguard against inadvertently duplicating the data in the table.

To import Locale seed data into the Translation Table (W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G)

1. Open a command window and navigate to $INSTALLDIR\SeedData\bin folder.

2. Run the import command in step 3 after replacing these connection parameters with the values appropriate to your database environment:

   • UserName

   • Password

   • ODBCDataSource

   • DatabaseOwner

3. Run the import command:

   $INSTALLDIR\SeedData\bin\dataimp /u $UserName /p $Password /c "$ODBCDataSource" /d $DatabaseOwner /f $INSTALLDIR\SeedData\<XX>\analytics_seed_<XXX>.dat /w y /q 100 /h Log /x f /i $INSTALLDIR\SeedData\<XX>\metadata_upgrade_<XXX>_<DBPlatform>.inp /l metadata_upgrade_<XXX>.log
   

   Note:

   Replace the XX with the Oracle Business Intelligence two-letter language code (_fr, _it) and the XXX with the Siebel Systems three-letter code (FRA, ITA).

4. When you have finished importing the Locale seed data into the Translation Table (W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G), configure the Initialization block in the Oracle BI Administration tool to connect to the database where this table resides.

   Note:

   Unicode connectivity can be used to access databases that do not support Unicode.

Externalizing Customer Metadata Strings

Metadata Strings are loaded by the Oracle BI Server from a database table. In the case of Oracle Business Intelligence applications, this table is W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G in the data warehouse. The initialization block 'Externalize Metadata Strings' loads the strings for the Server. It is recommended that you run a test to make sure that this initialization block runs successfully. An example of the translation table is shown in Table C-1.

Table C-1 Example of W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G Translation Table

MSG_NUM	MSG_TEXT	LANG_ID
CN_Customer_Satisfaction	Customer Satisfaction	ENU
CN_Customer_Satisfaction	Kundenzufriedenheit	DEU
CN_Customer_Satisfaction	Satisfação do cliente	PTB

By default, the Oracle Business Intelligence repository is configured to run in English only. To deploy in any other language, you must externalize the metadata strings, as described in the following procedure.

To externalize metadata strings in the Oracle Business Intelligence repository

1. Stop the Oracle BI Server.

2. Using the Oracle BI Administration Tool in offline mode, open OracleBIAnalyticsApps.rpd.

3. Select the entire Presentation layer and right-click the mouse to display the menu.

   • From the pop-up menu, select Externalize Display Names. (A check mark appears next to this option the next time you right-click on the Presentation layer.)

   • Unselect the Presentation layer.

     Note:

     When Externalize Display Names is checked, all metadata strings are read from the W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G table in the data warehouse.

4. In the Physical layer, select the Externalized Metadata Strings database icon. Expand the tree.

5. Double-click Internal System Connection Pool.

   In the Connection Pool dialog General tab, the field Data source name should point to the data warehouse.

6. Click OK and exit the Oracle BI Administration Tool.

7. Restart the Oracle BI Server.

Adding Custom Translations to the W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G Table

When you add custom objects to the metadata and choose to externalize these objects (by right-clicking the object and checking the Externalize Display Name option), the Oracle BI Server looks for the translations (including those for the native language) in the W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G table.

If you do not externalize the display names, you do not need to perform the following procedures.

Note:

The custom Presentation layer objects show up only in the native language of the metadata (the language in which you added these new objects).

Adding String Translations for Analytics Metadata

The following procedure describes how to add string translations for Oracle Business Intelligence metadata to the W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G table. This task occurs in any database administration tool, and in the Oracle BI Administration Tool.

To add string translations for Analytics metadata

1. Open a database administration tool and connect to your data warehouse database.

2. Query for the table named W_LOCALIZED_STRING_G and add a new record to the table, as defined below in steps 4 to 8.

3. Obtain the Message Key from the Oracle BI Administration Tool as follows:

   • In the Oracle BI Administration Tool, right-click on the new Presentation layer metadata object and select Properties from the menu.

   • The Message key is displayed in the dialog under Custom Display Name. The Message key is the part that starts with CN_.

     For example, double-click the Pipeline catalog folder in the Presentation layer. The Custom Display name is Valueof(NQ_SESSION.CN_Pipeline). CN_Pipeline is the Message Key.

4. Enter your deployment language in the new record.

5. Enter the Message Type required (for example, Metadata, FINS_Metadata).

6. Select the Message Level AnalyticsNew, then do the following:

   • In the Message Text column, add the translation of the object.

   • Check the flags (set to Yes) for the Translate and Active columns.

   • Set the Error Message # column to 0.

7. Enter the required Message Facility (for example, HMF, FIN).

8. Repeat Step 3 through Step 7 for each new metadata object string.

9. Exit the database administration tool, then restart the Oracle BI Server.

About Translating Presentation Services Strings

The translations for such Presentation Services objects as report and page names are stored in the xxxCaptions.xml files available in OracleBIData\web\res\<language abbreviation>\Captions directories. In multiple language deployment mode, if you add any additional Presentation Services objects, such as reports and new dashboard pages, you also need to add the appropriate translations. Add these translations using the Catalog Manager tool. For more information on using this utility, see Oracle Business Intelligence Presentation Services Administration Guide.

Changing the Default Currency in Analytics Applications

In Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, you may see a dollar sign used as the default symbol when amounts of money are displayed. In order to change this behavior, you must edit the currencies.xml file using the following procedure. The currencies.xml file is located in the following directories:

• Windows:

  $INSTALLDIR\OracleBI\Web\config\
  

• UNIX:

  $INSTALLDIR/OracleBI/web/config
  

To change the default currency in Analytics Applications

1. In a text editor, open the currencies.xml file.

2. Look for the currency tag for the warehouse default (tag="int:wrhs"):

   <Currency tag="int:wrhs" type="international" symbol="$" format="$#" digits="2"
   displayMessage="kmsgCurrencySiebelWarehouse">
      <negative tag="minus" format="-$#" />
   </Currency>
   

3. Replace the symbol, format, digits and negative information in the warehouse default with the information from the currency tag you want to use as the default.

   For example, if you want the Japanese Yen to be the default, replace the contents of the warehouse default currency tag with the values from the Japanese currency tag (tag="loc:ja-JP"):

   <Currency tag="loc:ja-JP" type="local" symbol="¥" locale="ja-JP" format="$#"
   digits="0">
      <negative tag="minus" format="-$#" />
   </Currency>
   

   When you are finished, the default warehouse currency tag for Japanese should look like the following example:

   <Currency tag="int:wrhs" type="international" symbol="¥" format="$#" digits="0"
   displayMessage="kmsgCurrencySiebelWarehouse">
      <negative tag="minus" format="-$#" /> 
   </Currency>
   

4. Save and close the currencies.xml file.