Introduction
Did you know that Aria Automation supports Regional language formats? So we can give a user from Japan a Japanese language set of Menus, tabs and help text in Assembler, Service Broker and Orchestrator. But more than that, we can also do some clever stuff to set up our Catalog Items to switch languages in selections depending on the Region the user is logged in from. I’m going to show you how to do this with a simple example, and this will get you thinking about the possibilities.
An English Catalog Item
So when a standard user logs in, they get the English language format service views we are all familiar with. Here is what the Catalog for the ‘Energy’ Project looks like to them in Service Broker:
So they request the vSphere-Win-2016 Catalog Item, and the ‘Request Form’ has a number of options in English:
- Project: Defaults to Energy
- Deployment Name: Free Text to Enter a name
- Site: Drop-down to select the site
- VM Environment: Regular Expression validated list
- Flavor Mapping: Drop-down list -> user has a selection in English ‘large’ or ‘small’
All good. So now we are going to find out how to change the language of the Services and also the Catalog Item ‘Flavor Mapping’ drop-down is going to change also.
Turning Japanese
So now let’s show you how to switch a Japanese Region user to their native language. We’ve logged in with a new user ‘Norio Tokuhisa’ and go to their ‘My Account’ settings:
From here we are going to set the ‘Language Format’ to Japanese (日本語）and select Save.
So now when we go back to the Cloud Services Console services list, there have been some changes.
Cloud Service Console is now ‘クラウドサービスコンソール’ in Japanese, as is the title – My Services. Sorry, we didn’t change ‘Service Broker’ or ‘Assembler’ to Katakana!
When we go into ‘Service Broker, the same Catalog now has a Japanese look and feel. The resource information is in Japanese, as is some information in the Catalog Items.
So they request the same vSphere-Win-2016 Catalog Item, and the ‘Request Form’ has a number of options in English but one is now in Japanese:
- Project: Defaults to Energy
- Deployment Name: Free Text to Enter a name
- Site: Drop-down to select the site
- VM Environment: Regular Expression validated list
- Flavor Mapping: Drop-down list -> user has a selection in Japanese, ‘小さい、大きい’
Pretty cool huh? This is just an example of one drop-down, but you can code away to have Region conditions on all your Catalog Item inputs. So next let’s look into Aria Orchestrator to find out how this is done.
Diving into Orchestrator
Action #1 : The Sub-Action
So this is done using two Actions in Aria Orchestrator. The first one we’ll look at is a sub-Action called by the master Action called ‘getAdCountryAttribute’ – always use camelCase for Action names, anything else just isn’t cool guys!
So as the name suggests, this Action takes a single Input Parameter of the requestors account name ‘adUser‘. It uses this to locate the user’s ‘Country’ attribute which is set in their Active Directory User Account. The Action returns the userCountry attribute value.
This code uses the Aria Orchestrator native Active Directory plugin and search methods – you can see it only takes a few lines of JavaScript code to get the job done without having to write any complex LDAP queries.
Action #2 : The Wrapper Action
Next let’s look at the Action ‘GetRegionFlavorMappings’, which is referenced by the ‘Flavor Mapping’ property on the Catalog Item Custom Form.
The Action also takes a single Input Parameter ‘adUser‘, which is obtained from the ‘Requested By’ field on the Custom Form.
- First, it calls the Action above to get the Country Attribute from Active Directory.
- Next it validates if the Country for the user is ‘Japan’, and if so sets the Flavor Mapping list to Japanese
- If anything else, the Flavor Mapping list is set to English. Note you could easily return other language lists here.
- The Action finally returns the Flavor Mapping list that has been set based on the Requestor’s country.
What about the Service Broker Setup? Well, I’m not going to show you how to set up the ‘Value Options’ in Service Broker on the Custom Form for the Action above, as I’m you can figure that out as many other people have blogged about it in the past.
Getting the Idea
So hope that gives you some ideas on how to ‘Regionalise’ your Services, views and Catalog Items in Aria Automation. This is useful for organisations where your Catalog consumers are international – across APAC you’d typically have at least 3-4 native language sets being used. Please go ahead and post any comments or questions, I’m happy to help.
