Defining Languages

A language code exists for every language spoken by your users. The system uses this code to supply information to users in their respective language. Select Admin Menu > Language to define a language.

Description of Page

Enter a unique Language Code and Description for the language.

Turn on Language Enable if the system should add a row for this language whenever a row is added in another language. For example, if you add a new currency code, the system will create language specific record for each language that has been enabled. You would only enable multiple languages if you have users who work in multiple languages.

The following two fields control how the contents of grids and search results are sorted by the Java virtual machine (JVM) on your web server:

• The Locale is a string containing three portions:
• • ISO language code (lower case, required)
  • ISO country code (upper case, optional)
  • Variant (optional).
• Underscores separate the various portions, and the variant can include further underscores to designate multiple variants. The specific JVM in use by your particular hardware/OS configuration constrains the available Locales. Validating the Locale against the JVM is outside the scope of this transaction. This means you are responsible for choosing valid Locales.

The following are examples of valid locales:

• en_US (this is for American English)
• en_AU (this is for Australian English)
• pt_BR (this is for Brazilian Portuguese)
• fr_FR_EURO (this is for European French)
• ja_JP (this if for Japanese)

In addition, the Java collation API can take a Collator Strength parameter. This parameter controls whether, for example, upper and lower-case characters are considered equivalent, or how accented characters are sorted. Valid values for collator strength are PRIMARY, SECONDARY, TERTIARY, and IDENTICAL. If you leave this field blank, Java will use its default value for the language. We'd like to stress that the impact of each value depends on the language.

Please see http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/guide/intl/locale.doc.html for more information about the collator strength for your language.

Display Order indicates if this language is written Left to Right or Right to Left.

Owner indicates if this language is owned by the base package or by your implementation ( Customer Modification). The system sets the owner to Customer Modification when you add a language. This information is display-only.

Where Used

Follow this link to open the data dictionary where you can view the tables that reference CI_LANGUAGE.

Note that all administrative control tables and system metadata that contain language-specific columns (e.g., a description) reference a language code.

In addition, other tables may reference the language as a specific column. For example, on the User record you indicate the preferred language of the user.