Impact of changing core_country.name to "translated text" field

Bernd Hoffmeier · ‎10-18-2022

We are a global acting company and our SN environment runs with currently 4 languages (EN, DE, FR, RU). We had a recent rollout of a process which brought up an interesting finding.

We have a record in the core_company table which contains out-of-the-box a reference to the core_country table. We use this field to display in what country the company is registered. Unfortunately if you switch your language to anything else then English, the country names are still in English because the core_country.name field is "String" and not "Translated Text".

Will there be any impact if we switch the dictionary type?

Have you ever experienced this in your multi lingual environments?

I'm always careful changing things on a core table.

Alex Coope - SN · ‎10-19-2022

@Bernd Hoffmeier,

So typically changing the field type of a "string" to "translated_text" should cause no impact providing you do not change the length of the field. This will for sure need to be tested in a sub-prod, but it's actually our recommendation for being able to translate a report title (you'll find a KB article on NowSupport stating you need to do the exact same thing).
- A "translated_text" field is just another type of string field, just with some extra logic to handle translations.

Super important note -> do this via an actual dictionary change so that the "XMLSerializer" is associated to the field as an attribute. If it doesn't then the translations will not work (it should be added automatically if you make the change on the field entry in sys_dictionary),

Many thanks,
Kind regards

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Director of Globalization Deployment, Internationalization

View solution in original post

Patrick Laroch1 · ‎10-18-2022

I have done that exact scenario but on a new implementation, so not sure of impact on an existing instance.

There was no impact in the new instance, just make sure you extract all data with sys_id first.

GodOfWar · ‎10-18-2022

The best way to do that is use the OOTB translation. You just have to add an additional translations on your list of translated values.

Mark Helpful if this help. Mark this as an answer if this aligns to your expected output.

Bernd Hoffmeier · ‎10-19-2022

What do you mean using the OOTB translation? I wanted to use that but the field is just string and not translated text so where can I store translated values then?

GodOfWar · ‎10-19-2022

There is table called "field labels table". It changes the value depending on the language set.

Mark Helpful if it helps.