Strategy ONE

Adding or Removing a Language in the System

You can add or remove languages and language variants from the system using the steps below.

Supporting Character Sets

Languages require a wide range of character sets to represent data. To support the languages you plan to use in your MicroStrategy projects, you must use databases that support the required character sets and that are configured accordingly. To determine whether your database supports the character sets required to display the languages you want to support, see your third-party database documentation.

Specifically, the database that allocates the metadata must be set with a code page that supports the languages that are intended to be used in your MicroStrategy project.

Adding a New Language to the System

You can add new languages to MicroStrategy. Once they are added, new languages are then available to be enabled for a project to support internationalization.

Variant languages (also called custom languages) can also be added. For example, you can create a new language called Accounting, based on the English language, for all users in your Accounting department. The language contains its own work-specific terminology.

You must have the Browse permission for the language object's ACL (access control list).

To Add a New Language to the System

  1. Log in to a project as a user with administrative privileges.
  2. Right-click the project and select Project Configuration.
  3. On the left side of the Project Configuration Editor, expand Language, then select either Metadata or Data, depending on whether you want to add the language to support metadata objects or to support data internationalization. For a description of the differences, see About Internationalization.
  4. Click Add.
  5. Click New.
  6. Click OK.
  7. If the language you added to the system is certified by MicroStrategy, you are prompted to automatically update system object translations that come with MicroStrategy. The information that is automatically updated includes translations of the following:
    • System folders: The Public Objects folder and the Schema Objects folder
    • Project objects: Autostyles and object templates
    • System configuration objects: Security roles and user groups
  8. Click Yes. You can also perform this update later, using the Project Configuration Editor, and selecting Upgrade in the Project Definition category.
  9. Disconnect and reconnect to the project source so that your changes take effect. To do this, right-click the project source, select Disconnect from Project Source, then repeat this and select Connect to Project Source.

Languages can also be added using the Languages Configuration Manager, by going to Administration > Configuration Managers > Language.

After adding a new language, if you use translator roles, be sure to create a new user group for translators of the new language (see Creating Translator Roles).

To Add a New Interface Language for MicroStrategy Web Users

This procedure provides high-level steps for adding a new language to the display of languages in MicroStrategy Web. After the new language is added, Web users can select this language for displaying various aspects of Web in the new language. For details and best practices to customize your MicroStrategy Web files, see the MicroStrategy Developer Library (MSDL), which is part of the MicroStrategy SDK.

  1. In the locales.xml file (located by default in <application-root-path>/WEB-INF/xml), add a new line for the language key using the example below:
  2. <locale locale-id=" 13313" language="HI" country="Ind" desc="Hindi" desc-id="mstrWeb.5097" char-set="UTF-8" char-set-excel="UnicodeLittle" codepage="65001" codepage-excel-"1252"/>
  3. Create resource files for the new language, for generic descriptors, based on existing resource files. For example:
    • For Web messages: Messages_Bundle_HI.properties
    • For number and date formats in the interface: Format_Config_HI.xml
  4. If you want to display feature-specific descriptors for the new language, you can create resource files based on existing resource files. For example:
    • DashboardDatesBundle_13313.xml
    • DossierViewerBundle_13313.xml

Creating a Language Variant: Multi-Tenancy

A language variant is a language that is similar to a standard language, because the variant is based on the standard language. A variant can be created for a specific purpose in an organization, for example, Executive Business English.

Multi-tenancy is providing numerous groups of users access to the same MicroStrategy environment, but changing the display of objects and object names or descriptions based on various configuration settings. For more information on multi-tenancy, see Multi-Tenant Environments: Object Name Personalization.

Removing a Language from the System

A language cannot be removed from the system if it is being used by a project, that is, if it has been enabled to be supported for a project. To remove a language from a project, that language must first be disabled from the project, as described in the steps below.

If a user has selected the language as a language preference, the preference will no longer be in effect once the language is disabled. The next lower priority language preference will take effect. To see the language preference priority hierarchy, see Configuring Metadata Object and Report Data Language Preferences.

To Remove a Language from the System

  1. Disable the language from all projects in which it was enabled:
  2. For metadata languages, any translations for the disabled language are not removed from the metadata with these steps. To remove translations:
    • For individual objects: Objects that contain translations in the disabled language must be modified and saved. You can use the Search dialog box from the Tools menu in Developer to locate objects that have translations in a given language.
    • For the entire metadata: Duplicate the project after the language has been removed, and do not include the translated strings in the duplicated project.
  3. For objects that had the disabled language as their default language, the following scenarios occur. The scenarios assume the project defaults to English, and the French language is disabled for the project:
    • If the object's default language is French, and the object contains both English and French translations, then, after French is disabled from the project, the object will only display the English translation. The object's default language automatically changes to English.
    • If the object's default language is French and the object contains only French translations, then, after French is disabled from the project, the French translation will be displayed but will be treated by the system as if it were English. The object's default language automatically changes to English.

For both scenarios above: If you later re-enable French for the project, the object's default language automatically changes back to French as long as no changes were made and saved for the object while the object had English as its default language. If changes were made and saved to the object while it had English as its default language, and you want to return the object's default language back to French, you can do so manually: right-click the object, select Properties, select Internationalization on the left, and choose a new default language.