1. Global Deployment Guide
  2. Types of Locales

Types of Locales

Different types of locales are described as follows:

  • User locale. The current language and country settings active for this session.

    You can set a locale to provide data to users in their native format, including the formatting of numeric information such as numbers, times, dates, and currencies. Typically, user locales contain the symbols for the thousand separator, decimal point, negative number representation, time separator, short data format, long data format, and currency symbols. A country specification is often used to select default values for user locale settings.

    Both the Siebel database and the Siebel applications have locale settings, which are independent of the operating system (except for the Siebel Mobile Web Client and Developer Web Client).

  • Input locale. The current language used for entering data from the keyboard.

    The input locale affects the layout of keys on the keyboard, and for some languages, the way in which those key entries are then processed before the application enters the data into the current form on the screen. The input locale describes the language being entered and the input method, which could be a particular keyboard layout or a speech-to-text converter.

    Keyboard layout is a defined input locale that correlates the keys on the keyboard to their subsequent character definition mapping within the code page of the operating system.

    An input method editor (IME) allows you to enter complex characters, such as those in Asian languages, directly from the keyboard. For information about setting the IME mode on applet controls and list columns, see Configuring Siebel Business Applications.

  • System locale. If you are using a Microsoft Windows operating system, then the system locale is a systemwide setting that designates which code page is used as the default for all of the users on the system. If you are using a UNIX operating system, then the settings for formatting and code page locales are not systemwide. These code pages and fonts allow non-Unicode applications to run as they would on a system localized to the language of the system locale.

    For more information about specifying the system locale on UNIX, see Siebel Installation Guide.

    Note: If you are using a Windows operating system, then you must restart the system after changing a system locale.