For convenience, an administrator or web developer might want to provide end-users a means of overriding browser language preferences temporarily by setting cookies; for example, by creating a company web portal link for users to click instead of manually changing their browser options.

By default, the PingFederate localization framework supports overriding the locale via a cookie named pf-accept-language. The cookie value must conform to guidelines defined under IETF BCP 47 (tools.ietf.org/html/bcp47). For more information about the Java core method that PingFederate uses to parse the cookie, see Locale.forLanguageTag(String languageTag).

Note that this locale-override behavior is the default implementation of the Java interface LocaleOverrideService defined in the PingFederate SDK (see the Javadoc for that interface in the <pf_install>/pingfederate/sdk/doc directory).

PingFederate displays the language indicated in the cookie if the language is supported in the language-packs directory. If the matching localization file is not found, PingFederate defaults to the browser settings.