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What is locale

Two locales in Magnolia

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An ordinary internet user, new or returning, or even an application issuing REST commands consuming content as JSON or XML via REST API – all of whom we shall call  visitor for simplicity – will usually only be able to see and interact with content of a published web project or website. The visitor will be interacting with a running public instance of Magnolia and will expect that the content of each page on the site will be available in a language he can understand or defines in his request, ideally in his native language. A visitor who's whose native language is English will prefer content in English (the screenshots are from the Travel Demo):

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On the other hand, an editor, publisher or even a sysadmin – let's refer to them with the term  AdminCentral user  – working with the author instance of Magnolia may have different locale preferences than the visitor. An AdminCentral user's native and hence preferred language may be, for example, Spanish but the content being edited may still be in English. The AdminCentral user would probably welcome if the following items in the author instance (see also Types of translatable text) are displayed in Spanish rather than in English:

• Field labels and descriptions,
• Messages (alerts, warnings, information),
• App UI elements such as workbenches, columns, forms and actions, and 
• Buttons in the page editor in edit mode (used to open dialogs)

in the author instance (see also Types of translatable text) were displayed in Spanish rather than in English:

Magnolia has been built to deal with these two separate locale preferences, that is with : 

• Public Locale
• AdminCentral Locale.

Determining and setting the latter is fairly straightforward since the system users will usually know which locale they prefer. They can also set the locale themselves directly in the AdminCentral or they may always ask a user with superuser rights to set the preferred locale for them.

To determine public locale is slightly more difficult. Visitors usually access web content as anonymous users. Magnolia then has to rely on indirect means that point to the preferred locale of a visitor.

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• Choose a language in the Language field:
  
  With the superuser role you may can set language locales for other users, see how at Setting an editor's language preference.

The new locale will be is applied the next time you login log in to the AdminCentral.

Public locale

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There are a number of ways of obtaining some form of locale information. Some of them use advanced techniques such as geolocation based on ping delay or topology, but one of the most common way ways is to look into the content of an HTTP request. At least the following three parts of an HTTP request are relevant to the identification of the public user's locale:

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From the User-Agent header

While occassionally containing The header may contain information such as en_US , for example in : 

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/4.5; NetBSD 5.0.2; X11; amd64; en_US) KHTML/4.5.4 (like Gecko)

However, this locale information in the User-Agent header:

• identifies Identifies the language variant of the software sending the request rather than the user's preferred locale, .
• is Is usually redundant,.

• and more Is often than not is missing:

  Code Block
  Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/63.0.3239.84 Safari/537.36

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The first represents language expressed as a 2 or 3-character string, the second represents language as a full language tag, the third says means "any language" (see Accept-Language and Language Tags in RFC-2616).

Additionally, the locale value that is sent in the header – optionally in a semicolon-delimited range for more languages – may be given an associated quality value ( q=<qvalue>). The quality value represents an estimate of the user's preference for the languages specified by that range, for example:

Accept-Language: cs-CZ,cs;q=0.9,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.7

A site in Magnolia may be configured to reflect In Magnolia the locale information provided in the Accept-Language header ,  see RequestLocaleAwareI18nContentSupport in the configuration section belowcan be handled by the RequestLocaleAwareI18nContentSupport implementation of the I18nContentSupport interface, see below in The I18nContentSupport interface subsection.

From Request-URI

The most common form of Request-URI is that used to identify a resource on an origin server or gateway. For example:

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/de/tour-type~active~.html

To configure a site in Magnolia to parse Request-URI for locale preference, see DefaultI18nContentSupport and HierarchyBasedI18nContentSupport in the configuration section belowIn Magnolia the locale information provided in the Request-URI can be handled by DefaultI18nContentSupport and HierarchyBasedI18nContentSupport implementations of the I18nContentSupport interface, see the details in the following subsection.

The I18nContentSupport interface

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