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Exploring the Technical Essentials of SAP Commerce Cloud

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cleanFiles/bookmap_SAP_Commerce_Cloud_Essentials_for_Develope_en-US_learning-sap-com_lsc-prod.zip (MMCP-DROPZONE) - 2023-10-23T13:02:50.000Z

Localizing the Type System

<div id="content"><p tabindex="0">Data and type system localization allow the following:</p><ul style="list-style-type:disc"><li tabindex="0">Displaying the storefront to customers in more than one language</li><li tabindex="0">Presenting internal business users managing the site with user interfaces in their own language</li></ul><p tabindex="0">Let’s discover more in the following video.</p><div class="kalturaVideoLessonWrapper"><div id="1_2vhhtjau" data-testid="video" class="kalturaVideoLessonContainer"></div></div></div>

SAP Commerce will be used by two broad classes of users:  customers who visit the site to purchase goods and services,  and internal users who make all that possible.  Internal users include product and website managers,  merchandizers, warehouse managers, customer support agents, and so on. Both groups may need their view of the site localized.   On the one hand, customers shopping in different countries want  to see product descriptions in their native language.  On the other hand, you can localize the Backoffice for the benefit  of your staff located in different countries so it matches their mother tongue.  For example English, French, Spanish, Hindi, or Chinese. Let’s see how that works.  When I visit the accelerator store, the site’s content is displayed in English,  since this is the language my browser is set to.  However, this site offers a drop-down allowing me to change its language to German, for example  I could also change it to Chinese or Japanese. Let’s pick Japanese this time.  Let’s see how that works in the Backoffice. When I edit the product I just looked at on the site,  I can see that some properties, such as the Article Number or the Catalog version,  have a value that’s not dependent on the customer’s language.  But others, like Identifier, have a value for each language defined for this website.  Clicking on the globe icon reveals that property’s localized values.  These localized values can be set for all properties defined as localized in items.xml,  such as Identifier, Description, and Summary; they are stored in the database.  Drop-down attributes, on the other hand,  depend on the UI language. Here, they’re in English. You can define an attribute as containing language-specific values  by adding the text localized: before the type’s name.  For example, a localized String is defined as localized:java.lang.String. You can also localize item references.  For example, it’s quite possible your car itemtype comes with a localized booklet.  This definition will allow you to llink to a Booklet instance for a specific language, using either the Backoffice or ImpEx.  A booklet in the correct language can then be accessed on the storefront  depending on the customer’s locale. But how does that work exactly?  The localized prefix is not a keyword, but simply part of the localized type’s name.  That is to say, localized:Booklet must be defined as a maptype in an items.xml file.  The maptype defines the expected argument type, in this case Language,  and the type returned, in this case a Booklet. So, after providing a Language item when accessing this attribute,  an instance of Booklet is returned.  Any localized type you use must be defined as a maptype.  Most of the types you’re likely to localize, such as  String, Double, Date, or Media,  already have a maptype defined in the core extension’s core-items.xml,  but if Booklet is a type you created,  it’s up to you to provide a localized maptype if you wish to use it in a localized manner. That covers localizing the website’s content.  But what about the Backoffice UI,  so your internal users can have property labels displayed in their language? Returning to the Backoffice, we click on the localization icon on the top right of the screen. A list of data locales is displayed; those are the locales for the data,  and the four languages relevant to the accelerator demo site are preselected.  Let’s add French, even though there is no French-language content on this site.  Now, when I look at the localized properties, a field for French appears, even if it’s empty. Going back to the localization icon,  let’s look at the second column, which allows us to change the locale of the UI itself.  Let’s switch to French. Okay, so every UI element in the Backoffice is now in French.  For instance, Article Number in French is displayed as Numéro d’article.   And the French entry for localized data is displayed by default,  and since that entry is blank, that’s reflected here.  Expanding the property’s display, we can find the data available  for  Japanese, German, Chinese, and English.  Note that the enumeration, considered a UI element,  is now localized to the Backoffice language, French,  and not one of the languages used to display the product to the customer.  So, how to you configure the Backoffice to localize attribute labels?  You need to provide this information in an i18n resource bundle,  a properties file in the localization folder.  The file is named for the current extension  and the ISO code of the language or locale you’re defining labels for. In this file, you localize the name of the type itself, and each of its attributes.  If you provide a description,  it will be shown as a tooltip when the user hovers over an attribute in the Backoffice.  You may also localize enumeration values. Let’s consider an example for the megacorpcore extension.  We can provide English-language attribute labels  in megacorpcore-locales_en.properties, which we’ll put in the localization subfolder of the extension’s resources folder.  That file defines labels for the car itemtype,  the horsepower attribute, the fuel enumeration,  and localizes that enumeration’s values gasoline and ethanol.  Here’s what the Backoffice would look like as a result. We can provide a more specific label for the UK market,  where they use the word ‘petrol’ for gasoline.  Or perhaps it’s Americans who use ‘gasoline’ for petrol…  In any case, if an internal user selects UK english as the Backoffice locale,  both these files will be merged, with entries in the more specific country file,  UK, overriding those in the more general English language file.  Here’s what the Backoffice would look like as a result. The same would happen for Spanish.  Internal users who select a Spanish locale that is not Mexico  will get the localized labels in the first file. Here is what the Backoffice would show in that case.  Users who select the locale Mexico will see those same labels,  but when the car’s name is displayed in the Backoffice,  it will be as Carro instead of Coche. For performance reasons, the Backoffice doesn’t read these files when it starts up. Instead, all localized labels are stored in the database.  Data is read from the localization properties file and written to the database  whenever you select ‘Localize types’ when you initialize or update the system. So each time you update localization properties file, remember to perform an update system with that checkbox selected.  If it’s the only thing the system update is doing, it will complete quickly.

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