Force EPM Web Language To English

Long time, no blog posts... Unfortunately I have been too busy at work to give much thought to my blog but here comes a small and useful trick I have been using quite a lot lately.

Many companies use EPM/Hyperion products throughout their world-wide organization. Latest EPM versions have been translated into a large number of languages which is naturally a good thing for all the end-users wanting to view the web interface in their own language. Supporting software that allows the language to be chosen by users (or by the web browser in this case) can be  challenging though - it may not be easy to deal with error reports shown in Chinese or Finnish for example.



EPM Workspace offers some functions to limit the languages shown in Workspace (see Navigate > Administer > Workspace Settings > Supported Locales and Default Locale). Unfortunately these settings - even in the latest EPM releases - fail to affect the web interface language in a consistent manner. Let's say you remove all languages but English from the list of supported locales:

This will force Workspace to show the menus in English and everything looks fine...

... unless the end-user has her browser set to prefer some other language (let's say Finnish):

The result is a mix of both languages: English is used in the Workspace menus (red rectangle) and Finnish in embedded content such as an HFM application (yellow rectangle):

There is a patch available for this issue for EPM 11.1.2.1 but it's meant to fix the issue for Planning only. But if your EPM environment has been configured to use OHS (Oracle HTTP Server) there is a simple workaround to the problem:

• Save a backup of the OHS configuration file (typically located in a path like D:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\epmsystem1\httpConfig\ohs\config\OHS\ohs_component\httpd.conf)
• Open httpd.conf in a text editor and add the following lines to the end of the file:

# Force web language to Engligh for all users.

RequestHeader set Accept-Language "en-us"

• Save the modified file and restart OHS.

Opening an application in Workspace should now result in a more consistent view:

English is not the only option of course. You can choose any locale from those supported by your EPM release (for EPM 11.1.2.2.300 the list is: ar, da, de, en, es, fi, fr, it, ja, ko, nl, no, pl, pt-BR, ru, sv, tr, zh-CN, zh-TW). If you want to display Workspace in "Gangnam style" for example you just set the Accept-Language value to "ko" (Korean).

Quite a long story about a single line of code... Please note that this approach only works when OHS is used as the front-end web server in the EPM environment and Workspace and other EPM modules are accessed via OHS for example http://myserver.com:19000/workspace/). Same kind of customization is probably possible for IIS too but I will have to leave that as an excercise for someone more adept with the Microsoft's web server.