CDF internationalization early access release

Today I finally completed the first implementation of the CDF Internationalization support. It is my first big effort to help in CDF and I'm proud I had the opportunity to work on a so important missing feature.
This is a first release, a sort of early access release, and it is available after building the framework sources from the repository trunk. I hope anyone can share ideas or suggestions on this feature helping making it better.

How does it works
CDF internationalization uses a jQuery i18n plugin to handle internationalized messages. The plugin support has been wrapped in the CDF framework so that the user never had to bother about jQuery specifics but will use the support CDF gives for that. Everything rounds about resource message files as usual in the java platform.

To create resources files we need to create  a file for each locale our dashboard is going to support. These files are named <name>.properties, or <name>_<language>.properties or <name>_<language>_<country>.properties. For instance a resource bundle for UK will be MessagesBundle_en_GB.properties. In case the message file will not be present the framework support will display the default message string and you'll get a warning in the bi server message console (nothing to be worried about but it would be better to have the required missing resource file).
The <language> argument is a valid ISO Language Code. These codes are the lower-case, two-letter codes as defined by ISO-639. You can find a full list of these codes at a number of sites, such as: http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/englangn.html.
The <country> argument is a valid ISO Country Code. These codes are the upper-case, two-letter codes as defined by ISO-3166. You can find a full list of these codes at a number of sites, such as: http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html.

How resource bundles are managed in CDF
We have two level of messages files in CDF

• Global message files: located in <biserver_home>/pentaho_solutions/system/pentaho_cdf/resources/languages and useful  when used in dashboard global templates.
• Dashboard specific message files: located in <dashboard_home> they can be distributed together with single dashboard in a sort of "package".  To enable Dashboard specific message files support we've to add a <messages> element to the xcdf file configuration whose value is the base name of the dashboard specific message file.

The CDF.i18n tag: internationalization support in HTML dashboard templates
To use the internationalization support in dashboards HTML templates we implemented a tag to use to get the message string from the resource bundle and use it where required in the HTML template file. This is useful for descriptions, annotations, generic labels and similar.

We can use the CDF.i18n tag using the following syntax:

CDF.i18n(<message_key>)


where <message_key> is the message key located in the message resource bundle files.

Internationalization support in CDF components
Because of the early preview stage of this first release, for the moment, only the jFreechart component supports internationalization. In this case the support applies to the chart's title attribute.
To support an internationalized title in a JFreechart component we added a new titleKey metadata attribute whose value is the message key for the chart title we can found in the resource bundle. A complete internationalization support for all the CDF components (where needed) will come shortly so be patient.

And here we go...
For anyone who want to have a first look on this, in the bi-developer solution you have in the repository trunk has a fully working example you can have a look and experiment with. Below two screenshots of the sample dashboard I made internationalized in the Italian language. I hope you enjoy playing with this first release and stay tuned here for the next updates from the field.