Set the visitor UI language automatically

Good question. I've done something like this before on another community, but I'm not sure if it would be considered "best practice." I have a question out to my peers about this and I'll be back soon with a better answer. I'm looking into this.

It's a little harder to implement automatically, but you could probably more easily do a dropdown that sets a registered user's preference, but to persist an anonymous user's preferences, you'd have to get Khoros support to turn on 

enable.PersistentAnonymousUserSettings = true

in your config.js file.  

If you want to get a parameter from the url, since your CDN/rp rewrites everything, you can use

https://developer.khoros.com/khoroscommunitydevdocs/reference/url

 to get the url and use the freemarker ?index_of to find what you're looking for in the string,

https://freemarker.apache.org/docs/ref_builtins_string.html#ref_builtin_index_of 

for example, though a bit messy because it's in longhand, it'll work:

<#assign myUrl = "http://somewebsite.com/purple/my/lang/cues/en/hello-there"/>
<#assign myLangStart = myUrl?index_of("my/lang/cues/") />
<#assign myLangEnd = myLangStart+1 />
<#assign myLang = myUrl[myLangStart..myLangEnd] />


myUrl: ${myUrl}
myLangStart; ${myLangStart}
myLangEnd: ${myLangEnd}
myLang: ${myLang}

And then set the language via modifying the user setting through the API. I'll find the link for you tomorrow. 

On this page, there is a url param that supposedly changes the profile language, though I haven't so far been able to get it to work on the sites I tested.

https://community.khoros.com/t5/Community-display/Languages-that-Khoros-Communities-support/ta-p/6566

• Add ?profile.language=KEY as a parameter to any URL in your community (where KEY is the language code listed on the page above).

Would you give this a shot on your community to see if it works? 

Hi IanKl ,

That's actually what we are doing today. It mostly works but I want to get away from it. That parameter breaks some things (like, the rank editor) and figuring out all the places where it's not proper is challenging and difficult to debug a url that's rewritten in flight. That's why I want to switch to some other way to signal a language preference to us and then we pull the logic down into init so we have more control over it.

So definitely looking for the "And then set the language via modifying the user setting through the API. I'll find the link for you tomorrow. "

Thanks for your help!

Mark

Ok, final answer, I believe, you need the following to set the user profile lanugage:

<#assign userLang = "fr" /> <#-- or whatever you want it to be -->
<#assign resp = restadmin("/users/id/${user.id?c}/settings/name/profile.language/set?value=" + userLang?url)/>

 Unfortunately, the documentation for setting the profile.language (or really, any setting) does not include the critical last part of the correct API call, 

https://community.yoursite.com/restapi/vc/users/id/[user_id]/settings/name/[setting_name]/set?value=[language_id]?url  

or, for example, 

https://community.khoros.com/restapi/vc/users/id/1234/settings/name/profile.language/set?value=fr?url 

where?url indicates that it should be url encoded.

Ok, hope that all answers your question enough for you to get a working solution. If not, mdfw just tag me here and I'll try to help some more 

- Ian

Anytime. 

You can also use a combination of testing browser.location values vs user profile values vs IP locations vs request language vs cookies in a custom component which then assigns the user's profile.language setting.

You might find this and some of the other Freemarker Context Object http methods helpful:

https://developer.khoros.com/khoroscommunitydevdocs/reference/requestlang 

and https://developer.khoros.com/khoroscommunitydevdocs/reference/headersnamegetheader_name-default_value  + https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers 

and others in those headings. 

IanKl - OK! That's one missing piece that we didn't have before. We are getting closer.

But how do we do this for anonymous users? Can't call against the user collection for a user that doesn't have an id. I assume there's something in the session that can get set? Something like:

<#assign userLang = "fr" /> <#-- or whatever you want it to be -->
${http.session.setAttribute("WHAT?", userLang)}>

(from https://developer.khoros.com/khoroscommunitydevdocs/reference/setattributeattribute_name-attribute_value)

Good question mdfw  I was hoping the ?profile.language=xx hack would solve that but I have not seen it work on a Community yet. Did it work on yours?

In the meantime I will look into whether we can change a setting like that for a default user and get back to you. 

It's interesting IanKl - I swear the profile.language worked before as we signed off on the current implementation but just had a colleague in Costa Rica test it and it didn't work. So, I may have 2 problems now. 🙂 I'll get some more tests done to see if we can narrow it down.

Regardless, I'd like replace it with something, just don't know what that something is.

Ok, mdfw  https://forums.ni.com/?profile.language=zh-CN (for example) does work on your community, and according to everything I can find, the only way to set a language for an anonymous user is by setting this url parameter. 

So I would use the combination of tricks I mentioned above (probably starting with a cookie) to let the community know to change the language in the url for this user. As far as I can tell so far, that's your only option for anonymous users. 

So, on load just check if there's a cookie with the languageValue value, if so, something like (pseudocode, use whatever cookie code style you prefer😞

if(cookie exists with value = langaugeValue){
  window.location = yoururl + "?profile.language="+languageValue
}

if not drop a cookie for next time

set a cookie = "languageValue=XX; expires=whatever date; path=/";