How to Localize the Aptify Interface

The following is an overview of how an organization localizes the Aptify interface to support multiple cultures:

1. An organization identifies the supported cultures and creates a Cultures record for each, as necessary. See Defining Cultures for details.
2. An organization identifies the text strings that require localization and defines the applicable local string for existing Culture Strings already in the system. If a particular string is not already present, the organization creates a new Culture Strings record as needed. Each Culture Strings record contains a sub-type record that identifies the string's appearance for a particular culture. See Working with Culture Strings for details.
   • The Culture Strings service includes a set of records to localize all areas of the Aptify system that are accessible by the typical end user. An organization only needs to add the applicable Local Strings for the organization's supported cultures to these Culture Strings. Aptify's delivered culture strings covers both metadata records (such as Entity Name culture strings) and culture strings that are embedded in code (such as display names in code-based wizards).
   • The Localization Administration application includes a Localization Grid dashboard that can be utilized to simplify the data entry process for translating various culture strings into a localized language. Culture String/Language relationships can easily be modified by directly editing the string within the grid without having to open any Culture Strings records. Note that this is a global dashboard that does not appear by default. See Defining Local Strings with the Localization Dashboard for details.
     
     
3. An organization links new system metadata to Culture Strings as needed (since all of the Aptify-delivered culture strings are already linked to the appropriate locations). See Linking Fields to Culture Strings for details.
4. As applicable when creating configurations that need to support localization, a developer leverages a set of Aptify-supplied functions that can return the applicable local string for the currently logged-in user. See Programmatically Retrieving Culture String Data.
5. An organization links each user to a culture. See Linking Users to Cultures for details.
6. When a user logs into Aptify, the system displays text and captions in that user's specified culture for all data that is linked to a Culture Strings record.

Note that localization not only applies to the user interface but also to address management to display addresses and phone numbers in the format familiar to the user and to prepare address mailing labels in the format suitable for the destination. See Managing International Addresses for details.

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