Oct 27 2008

Designer XI 3 New Feature: Translation Manager

Categories: Universe Design Dave Rathbun @ 11:28 am

Introducing the Translation Manager

Translation Manager is a new tool that allows you to extract information from your universe, provide translations, and then store that translated information back into your universe. Anything that the user can see can be translated, including class names, objects names, descriptions, and even prompt text. Things the user cannot see like table names and joins are not translated, which makes sense. The data itself is not translated by this tool. Once the universe is published, the user’s location can be used to deliver a language-customized version of the universe. In the United States I’m not sure how often this would be used. (“Texan” is not recognized as a language, y’all. 😆 ) But for international companies it certainly makes sense.

No Custom Languages

One thing that I have suggested to the Designer product team is the ability to set up custom languages. And no, I’m not doing this because I want to translate my universe into Texan. 😛

Imagine this scenario: You are a company with a product that requires reporting support. You have selected to bundle Business Objects along with your product. But each client that you sell to has the option to customize your application, including custom naming for various elements. You would like to be able to deliver that same custom name as a part of the universe.

Today you can do this with the @Select() function and by setting up a hidden class with source data, client-specific classes with their renamed objects, and security restrictions. But this is complicated. If you could create a custom language file and distribute it with your universe, wouldn’t that solve this problem in a very cool way?

This feature was one of several mentioned in my Designer Essentials presentation delivered at the 2008 GBN conference. This particular feature was on page 7.