15. Multilanguage support

The same report template can be reused for up to 6 different languages (the default one and 5 alternative). Multilanguage support means the label fields can be entered in different languages. The report tasks_lang.xre is an example of this.

In the report‘s properties, tab „Lang.“ up to 5 additional languages can be defined. Recomended is the use of the ISO-3166 country codes to identify the languages but this is not mandatory.

In the Active lang. Field you can select the current active language which wil be used when the PDF generation button is pressed or for the Export FO function. Set it to Main is you have only one language.




Note that when exporting to FO, the file selection dialog will display the current selected language and the proposed output file will contain the country code suffix.



But before the alternative languages can be used, you need to assign  a value to each label field. Label fields are those without an Xpath expression and therefore contain constant values.


Labels fields normally have this flag set:

The example below depicts how the „Task name“ field, has been translated to spanish and german, being the default language english.




At this point if you set the active language property of the report to be „Alt. language 1“ which maps to the code ES for spanish, the PDF output will be in spanish




Output after generating the PDF




Note however:

  1.     The value „HR software needs upgrade“ is in english because this is an element coming from the input XML file, this is therefore not a label.
  2.     Each individual exported FO file can be used for one language only. Therefore you will need to generate one FO file for each language,
  3.     The following objects support multilanguage:
  4.     If you use an alternative language you must define the language label for each individual label. If you miss one you will get an error as below: