Adding bidirectional language support

IBM® Business Process Manager can support languages that are written from right to left and languages that are written from left to right.

About this task

By default, IBM Business Process Manager uses left to right as its text direction. However, you can reverse this direction for any Coach View by using its Base Text Direction general property. For example, by using this property, you can have a Coach with fields with English text that is going from left to right and fields with Arabic text that is going from right to left.

The Base Text Direction property is not available until you enable it as a preference of Process Designer.

Procedure

Using the steps that are contained in Setting preferences, click the Capabilities > IBM BPM Advanced Features > Base Text Direction option.

In the General properties of a Coach View, set the Base Text Direction property to one of the following values:

Value	Description
Default	Inherit the text direction that is set in the user's profile.
Contextual	Display the text according to the first strong directional character in the string. For example, if the first strong directional character is from a right to left language, display the text from right to left. This applies to all text elements that a Coach View displays. For example, a Text stock control has an Arabic label but its contents are English. In this case, the text in the label is right to left while the text in the field is left to right.
Left to Right	Display the text from left to right no matter what characters are in the text.
Right to Left	Display the text from right to left no matter what characters are in the text.

Optional: To provide customized styling for bidirectional languages, use the CoachViewRTL class in your CSS rules. When the Coach is generated for a bidi language, it contains a tag like the following example:
```
<body dir="rtl" class="CoachViewRTL">
```
Optional: To support UI mirroring that is opposite to the default directional setting of the current locale, add an attribute to its HTML attribute properties. Set the name of the attribute to dir and the value to ltr or rtl. Any Coach Views contained by this Coach View inherit this attribute.

What to do next

Implementing mirroring and bidirectional text for a Coach or composite Coach View is an iterative activity. You might have to repeat steps 2 to 4 each of the children Coach Views until you achieve the look that you want.