Managing Languages and Locales

The operating system locale setting determines the run locale for IBM® Cognos® server requests, as well as the current code page for Cognos Transformer. To change the system locale on Windows, you must update the Regional and Language Options, including the language for non-Unicode programs. Changing these settings on Windows requires that you restart the computer. On UNIX systems, you can change the locale without restarting the computer.

To display the run locale Cognos Transformer is currently using, view the Session Information available from the File menu. For example, if the locale is set to English (Canada), the run locale will be en-ca. Cognos Transformer sends the run locale in its requests to the server. When Cognos Transformer is requesting data from a multilingual package or report, the run locale may be used to determine the language in which data is returned.

Important: When a report is authored, the author chooses a content locale. This content locale is saved with the report and it is the locale in which the metadata is expressed when Cognos Transformer accesses the report. Ensure that reports used as data sources in Cognos Transformer have the appropriate content locale.

By default, Cognos Transformer builds PowerCubes in the current code page as determined by the locale settings. On many UNIX and Linux® systems, the default code page is UTF-8. Cognos Transformer 8.x and later versions can build PowerCubes in the UTF-8 code page, which is a Unicode encoding. The resulting cube is not a multilingual cube; it is a unilingual cube in the UTF-8 code page. IBM Cognos Series 7 products are unable to read PowerCubes that use the UTF-8 code page. To build PowerCubes in a code page that is different than the current code page, you can change the Cube code page setting on the Model properties sheet. For example, you can build a windows-1252 code page PowerCube on Linux so that IBM Cognos Series 7 products can use the cube.

Cognos Transformer supports Unicode data sources, including Framework Manager packages, IBM Cognos reports, and exported .csv files from IBM Cognos reports. Cognos Transformer converts the Unicode data to the code page of the current locale for processing and display, and will also convert the data to a cube code page if one is specified. You must use compatible code pages, otherwise character loss may occur. For example, you should not process Japanese text data when Cognos Transformer is running in an English locale.

Creating multilingual packages in Framework Manager

When creating a multilingual package in Framework Manager that you intend to use as a data source in Cognos Transformer, you must use a design language that corresponds to the Cognos Transformer operating system language. When the package is imported into Cognos Transformer, the metadata is expressed in the operating system locale used in Cognos Transformer. For example, a multilingual Framework Manager package that was designed in English shows the metadata in French if Cognos Transformer is using a French operating system. However, column references appear in English in the Cognos Transformer model because they use the Framework Manager design language. Having the metadata in one language and column references in another can result in non-functioning queries.