Customizing product strings
You can replace a word or phrase in the product user interface with terminology that better suits your environment.
Before you begin
- You cannot use this method to customize the default notification messages in emails that are sent from IBM Connections applications. See Customizing notifications for information about how to customize notifications.
- You cannot use the customization debugging capability to test edited strings.
About this task
Procedure
- Find the key that is used to represent the value of the string that you want to customize. For a list of the application properties files that contain strings you can customize, see Property file strings.
- Create a properties file in which to store the key-value
pair for the custom string. Give the properties file the same name
as the properties file that is used to store that key by the application.
For example, if you copy the templates.properties file,
and paste it into the customizationDir/strings directory,
name it as follows:
com.ibm.lconn.core.strings.templates.properties
Note: You must create the file with the full file name; that is, it must not be a series of directories containing the templates.properties file, such as, com/ibm/lconn/core/strings/templates.properties.Also, specify a language code for the properties file in the file name. If you do not provide a _language_code value at the end of the properties file name, the value you specify for the key in the properties file is used despite the locale of the web browser accessing the application.
For example, if you change the key with the current value of "Help" to "Ayuda" and define it in a file named com.ibm.lconn.files.strings.ui.properties (without the _es suffix), then anyone who accesses the product will see Aydua in place of the Help string even if their browser locale is not set to es. In some cases, you might want the same value applied to all languages. If you want to change the term "IBM® Connections" to a company name, for example, then you might store the customized key in a properties file without the _language_code suffix and the company name shows as-is to all browsers.
For a full list of the language codes supported by IBM® Connections, see Language codes.
- Save the properties file that you created in the following
directory:
where customizationDir is the root directory for customization files. See Determining where to save your customizations for more details. Unlike some of the other areas of the product, the strings directory in the customization root does not have a subdirectory for each application. Each application uses unique properties file names so all of the strings that you replace can be stored in this common strings directory.customizationDir/strings
- Using the IBM® WebSphere® Application Server Integrated Solutions Console, stop and restart each application EAR file.
- Test your changes by clearing your browser cache, and then refreshing the browser.
- To force all user web browsers to refresh all cached content
and display your changes, run the command that updates the product
version stamp.