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.

Customize CDF jfreechart component

I was dealing with CDF Dashboards during these days and I had to set line-width and line-style attributes in my jFreechartComponent's LineChart widget.

Looking at the jFreechartComponent documentation you clearly see that in the standard implementation some attributes, specifics only to some chart types, aren't implemented. This was also for the two attributes line-width and line-style related to the LineChart widget.  But this is not a problem because we can add that missing attibutes very easily and I'll show you how. The interesting thing is that I can manage all the attributes that are available for a specific JFreeChart chart type.

If you need to add support for missed JFreeChart chart's attributes you can follow the steps summarized below. We suppose to add line-width and line-style attributes and to access them from CDF jFreechartComponent as two properties respectively named lineWidth and lineStyle.

1) Go to <biserver-home>/pentaho-solutions/cdf/components and open jfreechart.xaction and open it with your favourite editor.


2) Add two new elements to the inputs section of the .xaction file. Below an example of the file with the two new inputs added. Remember here that the value of the request element (see lines 5 and 11 below)  has to be the same in name and in case as the name of the property we want to put in our CDF jFreechartComponent definition. Then be careful to correctly assign a the default value needed in case that the property isn't provided (see lines 7 and 13) by you CDF component call. This is particularly important when our attribute is a number. If you don't assign it properly you'll get a NumberFormatException.

1:  <inputs>   
2:    <!-- Omitted for brevity -->       
3:       <LINEWIDTH type="string">  
4:            <sources>  
5:                 <request>lineWidth</request>  
6:            </sources>  
7:            <default-value>1.5</default-value>  
8:       </LINEWIDTH>  
9:       <LINESTYLE type="string">  
10:            <sources>  
11:                 <request>lineStyle</request>  
12:            </sources>  
13:            <default-value/>  
14:       </LINESTYLE>  
15:    <!-- Omitted for brevity -->       
16:  </inputs>  

3) Add the new inputs previously defined in the inputs section (see above) to the  action-inputs section of our ChartComponent action-definition (as shown below at lines 7 and 8). Then, use these new fields to populate two new property elements added to the chart-attributes section as shown at line 25-26. Be very careful here because the name of the element you give to every new chart attribute has to be equal to the related attribute for the JFreeChart library. For example: if in JFreeChart library the line width  attribute is named line-width that is the name to be considered as child element of the chart-attributes element. Then the value to be assigne to that new element is the name of the related action input element (for line-width we will assign as value the LINEWIDTH element. See line 25 below).

1:       <action-definition>   
2:            <component-name>ChartComponent</component-name>  
3:            <action-type>Chart</action-type>  
4:            <action-inputs>   
5:                 <chart-data type="result-set" mapping="newResults"/>   
6:                  <!-- Omitted for brevity -->       
7:                 <LINEWIDTH   type="string"/>  
8:                 <LINESTYLE   type="string"/>  
9:                 <!-- Omitted for brevity -->       
10:            </action-inputs>  
11:            <action-resources/>  
12:            <action-outputs>   
13:                 <chart-filename type="string"/>   
14:                 <base-url type="string"/>   
15:                 <chart-mapping type="string"/>   
16:                 <image-tag type="string"/>   
17:                 <chart-output type="content"/>   
18:            </action-outputs>  
19:            <component-definition>   
20:                 <width>{WIDTH}</width>   
21:                 <height>{HEIGHT}</height>   
22:                 <by-row>{BYROW}</by-row>   
23:                 <chart-attributes>   
24:                 <!-- Omitted for brevity -->       
25:                      <line-width>{LINEWIDTH}</line-width>  
26:                      <line-style>{LINESTYLE}</line-style>  
27:                 <!-- Omitted for brevity -->       
28:                 </chart-attributes>   
29:            </component-definition>   
30:       </action-definition>