PingFederate Server

Localizing messages for end users

PingFederate supports localization for several types of messages for end users.

About this task

Administrators can localize the following message types:

  • on-screen messages

  • email messages

  • text messages (SMS)

  • authentication API error messages

The English contents for each message type are in the <pf_install>/pingfederate/server/default/conf/language-packs directory.

Message type Default message file

On-screen messages

pingfederate-messages.properties

Email messages

pingfederate-email-messages.properties

Text messages (SMS)

pingfederate-sms-messages.properties

Authentication API error messages

authn-api-messages.properties

Steps

  1. Create a copy of the associated default message file in the language-packs directory.

  2. Provide translated text in place of English and then append the standard language tag to the base file name, as indicated in the browser settings.

    For example, to localize the user-facing window messages in French, rename the translated copy of the localization file to pingfederate-messages_fr.properties.

    If the system language of the PingFederate server is not English, copy the default (English) message file and append _en at the end of the file name for any English users, such as from pingfederate-messages.properties to pingfederate-messages_en.properties, translate the default message file for the local users, and provide additional translations as needed.

  3. If you want to include a region, append the capitalized abbreviation to the standard language tag with an underscore between them.

    For example, to localize the text messages in Canadian French, rename the translated copy to pingfederate-sms-messages_fr_CA.properties.

    The capitalization and underscore usage might not correspond to the way regions are listed in browser settings. However, the usage is required by the Java-based localization implementation.

  4. If you have a clustered PingFederate environment, copy the localized message files to each node.

Result

For on-screen and email messages, developers can also customize the look and feel of the templates by using localization variables in logic statements to control fonts, color, and other style elements. For more information, see the template files for examples.

To maximize performance, PingFederate caches localized UI strings on start-up. For testing new localization implementations, an administrator can temporarily turn off caching by changing the value of the cache-language-pack-messages element to false in the <pf_install>/pingfederate/server/default/data/config-store/locale-options.xml file.

Return the value to true when testing is complete. You must restart the server after changes to configuration files.