Set the visitor UI language automatically

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. 

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

A little excerpt from the code docs of my own Khoros framework as we are dealing with multilanguage communities every day:

The cookie interesting to us regarding language logic is `lia.anon.profile.language` which stores the community-wide language setting for anonymous users and is set and changed whenever the URL parameter `?profile.language=<lang>` is provided, although
this only happens when the ancient config `enable.PersistentAnonymousUserSettings = true` is set (has to be requested from support, not true by default!). This automatically
set cookie is a common source of issues, as the cookie is only written when a user is NOT logged in! We can take care of that by updating the cookie manually right after the language is set via REST API for an authenticated user.

A custom cookie + attributes can be created and set in the page init script like follows:

```
	<#assign cookie = http.request.createCookie('<cookiename>', '<cookievalue>') />
	${cookie.setMaxAge(365*24*60*60)}
	${cookie.setDomain('.domain.com')}
	${cookie.setPath('/')}
	${cookie.setValue('your cookie value')}
	${cookie.setHttpOnly(true)}
	${cookie.setSecure(true)}
	${cookie.setComment('Describes what this cookie does')}
	${http.response.addCookie(cookie)}
```

and be checked with `${http.request.cookies.name.get('<cookiename>')}`.

Key takeaway here is to use that cookie lia.anon.profile.language and use it as the main source of "language-truth" AND keep it updated when a user is logged in and changes languages. Keeping it up-to-date is also important to KEEP the logged-in language when a user logs out, because if the logged-in language differs from the value of the cookie, the user will experience a "nice" language switch when logging out 😉

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.

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? 

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. 

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=/";