Globalizing service flows

Globalizing your service flows enables them to produce entities, such as business objects, for users in different language locales. To enable translation, you must create localization resources for the service flows, and modify the scripts included in them to use these localization resources.

1. Create localization resources for the service flows:
   1. Open Process Designer and your process application or toolkit in the Designer view.
   2. In the library, click the plus sign next to User Interface and select Localization Resource.
   3. Provide a name for your new resource bundle and click Finish.
   4. For each translatable string in your application, enter a translation key and a default value for that key. The default value is the value that is used if no translation is available.
2. After you have created your localization resources, you can associate them with your service flows. In the Variables tab of the service flow, click the plus sign next to Localization Resources, and select a localization resource that you want to reference. Repeat this process until you have selected all the localization resources that you want to use.
3. Modify the scripts, including script tasks and pre- and post-scripts of activities to replace literal strings with references to the properties from localization resources.
   1. For references to localization resources defined in the same process application or toolkit, replace the literal string with the syntax tw.resource.lrname.propname.
      • lrname represents the name of the localization resource.
      • propname represents the name of a property in the localization resource.
   2. For references to localization resources defined in a dependent toolkit, replace the literal string with the syntax tw.resource.toolkit.tkname.lrname.propname.
      • tkname represents the name of a dependent toolkit.
      • lrname represents the name of a localization resource in that toolkit.
      • propname represents the name of a property in the localization resource.

      Tip: Use content assist (Ctrl-space) to help you pick the correct reference without typos.
4. Add translations to the service flows:
   1. Export the resource bundle for translation. Click Export to export the existing set of keys to a .zip file to which you will add the corresponding translated properties files.
   2. You must manually create a new properties file for each language locale that you will translate your user interface into. For each language that you want your application to support, create a copy of the exported properties file, renaming it according to the language that it will be supporting. For example, if your default properties file is my_application.properties and you want your application to support Japanese, create a copy of the file called my_application_ja.properties.
      Note: Language support also extends to specific countries. For example, different locale options are provided for English (en_US, en_CA), French (fr and fr_CA), and Portuguese (pt and pt_BR). If you add a locale for a language variant, such as British or Australian English, or Colombian Spanish, you must update the available.locales mashup configuration property from the WebSphere® Application Server administration console. Make sure that you write the values for this property in lowercase, separate the value elements with a dash (-), and separate the values with commas, as follows: en-gb, en-au, es-co

      For more information about custom properties for Process Portal, see Configuring mashups custom properties for Process Portal.

      The file naming scheme follows that of the Java specification, and is as follows:

      my_application_ll.properties

      where ll is the lowercase language code (fr, pt, en, and so on), or

      my_application_ll_CC.properties

      where ll is the lowercase language code (fr, pt, en, and so on), and CC is the uppercase country code (CA, US, BR, and so on).
   3. Have each of the files translated into the corresponding languages.
   4. To import your resource bundle into your process application, open the localization resource file in Process Designer and click Import.
   5. Browse to your updated .zip file to select it and click Finish.
      If you select to overwrite the values for all existing keys, then for any given language, key values in the imported files that do not match the existing key values will replace the existing values. Any new keys are added to the existing set of keys in the existing localization resource.

      If there are any missing keys in any of the translated files, warnings are displayed. Click each of the languages that are flagged with a warning to see which key translations are missing. If you do not supply translations for these keys, the default value is used in any service flows that reference this key.