Localizing a Portal

If you want to create a portal application that can serve users in different languages and locales, you should read the Internationalizing an ATG Web Site chapter in the ATG Platform Programming Guide. This section describes a few considerations that are specific to an ATG Portal application.

You can enable support for additional locales and change character encodings used for the entire portal. This is done by copying, renaming, and (if you want to change a locale’s default character set) editing a file that is provided with the Portal module. Use the following procedure:

  1. In your <ATG10dir> directory, create the following directory branch:

    <ATG10dir>/home/locallib/atg/portal/framework

  2. Locate and copy the LocaleSettings.properties file within your ATG installation. The file is in:

    <ATG10dir>/Portal/lib/classes.jar

  3. Place the copy of the LocaleSettings.properties file into the new directory you created, and make additional copies for each locale you want to add to the portal.

  4. Add the language and/or locale setting to the filename, as follows:

    LocaleSettings_language_country.properties

    where the required language is the desired Java language code (which is the same as the ISO two-letter language code) and the optional country is the desired Java locale code (which is the same as the ISO two-letter country code). For example, if you want to add French, you would name your file LocaleSettings_fr.properties and if you wanted to add French with a country of Canada, you would name your file LocaleSettings_fr_CA.properties. For more details, refer to the Java internationalization documentation.

  5. If you also want to change the default character set for the language or language/locale combination, open the file and add the non-default character set.

    The following sample illustrates how you would change Japanese with an EUC character set to Japanese with an SJIS character set:

# Version: $Change: 219562 $$DateTime: 2001/11/12 13:47:44 $
# If you want to override the default Java-chosen charset for this locale
# add a line charset=the-charset to this file.
# For example for Japanese using SJIS in place of EUC:
# charset=Shift_JIS
# Or for Unicode:
# charset=UTF-8
charset=Shift_JIS

In addition, you need to make sure that the gears you want to use in your localized portals are also localized into each of the locales you want to support. See Localization Considerations in the Designing a Gear chapter of the ATG Portal Development Guide.