Controlling Information Process and Display
You can ensure that data is correctly displayed and processed for a given user—regardless of the user’s language or location—by specifying the following values in User Maintenance:
Language
Enter a two-letter code identifying the user’s language. The system displays menus, messages, and other interface elements in this language when the user logs in.
Country Code
Enter a three-character country code to associate with the user. The country code must be defined in Country Code Maintenance (2.14.1) and it must have an associated alternate country code.
The alternate country code must be a valid International Organization for Standardization (ISO) country code. The system uses the ISO code to set up date and number formats and other interface elements for each user session.
See User Guide: Master Data.
Variant
Optionally enter the locale for the user. This field can be used to specify regional variations within a country.
Information on language, country code, and variant are maintained in a file named locale.dat, along with other format information. Once the system determines a user’s language, country code, and corresponding ISO country code, it gets information from locale.dat and uses it to set user-specific date and number formats.
See the installation guide for more information.
System administrators may need to change information in locale.dat or add entries for countries that are not included in the current file.
Each line in the file follows the same format. For example, the line for US English looks like this:
US,en,US,,mdy,American
Where:
• US is the language code.
• en is the ISO language code.
• US is the ISO country code.
• Optional variant is blank.
• mdy is the date format.
• American is the numeric format (period as the decimal separator; comma as the thousand separator).