Change Product Designer display language and help

These instructions describe how to add or change the display language for the user interface and online help from U.S. English to another language provided in the base configuration or to a language for which you provide the content.

Before you begin

Your computer must have the following setup:
  • Supported Java Development Kit (JDK) with jar.exe installed
  • JAVA_HOME/bin in your PATH

About this task

In these steps, you will be working in the PolicyCenter/productdesigner/java_version/language-config directory.

Content for the Product Designer user interface and online help is provided for all languages in the base configuration. These instructions tell you how to make these languages available in the user interface and online help.

You can use these instructions to make available a language that is not in the base configuration. However, you must create the content.

Procedure

  • Unpack
    1. To unpack the user interface and online help files from productdesigner.war, navigate to the productdesigner/java_version/language-config directory and run unpack.bat.
      This command extracts files to the language-config/config/locale directory. Running this command creates the following files and directories in locale:
      • language.properties file lists the languages to display in Product Designer.

      • display.properties and display_languageCode.properties files contain the user interface strings for U.S. English and other languages.

      • doc directory contains localized content for online help. There are en_US and languageCode subdirectories for each language included in the base configuration. The online help for each language is in a productdesigner subdirectory.
  • Optional: Create localized content for a language not in the base configuration
    1. In language-config/config/locale, create a display_languageCode.properties file with localized versions of the user interface strings.
    2. In language-config/config/locale/doc, create a doc/languageCode directory and add localized online help content.
  • Configure display languages
    1. Open language-config/config/locale/language.properties in a text editor.
    2. For each language that you would like to appear in the user interface, add a entry using the following format: languageCode = Description.
    3. To change the default language, change the default.language property value to one of the languageCode values.
    4. Save and close language.properties.
  • Repack
    1. To repack the localized content into a new productdesigner.war file, navigate to the productdesigner/java_version/language-config directory and run repack.bat.
      This command creates a new productdesigner.war in the language-config/output directory. The WAR file contains your new language configuration.
  • Deploy to a single-user Product Designer instance
    1. Make a backup copy of productdesigner/java_version/war/productdesigner.war in a location outside the PolicyCenter installation.
    2. Copy productdesigner.war from the language-config/output directory to the original location (productdesigner/java_version/war) on each computer that runs Product Designer, overwriting the old productdesigner.war file in that location.
    3. Start Product Designer by following the instructions in the Product Designer Guide.
  • Deploy to a multi-user Product Designer instance
    1. Make a backup copy of productdesigner/java_version/war/productdesigner.war in a location outside the PolicyCenter installation.
    2. Copy productdesigner.war from language-config/output to your application server.
    3. Deploy the WAR file by following the deployment instructions for your application server.
    4. Start the application server and log in to Product Designer from a web browser using the appropriate URL.

    Results

    • The Product Designer application server will not start if default.language is not defined or is not set to a valid language.
    • Product Designer does not validate the display.properties contents for a given language. Therefore, you must localize all display keys to preserve the integrity of the user interface.