User Locales

A locale specifies linguistic information and cultural conventions for character type, collation, format of date and time, currency unit, and messages. You can specify locales for individual products, content, servers, authors, and users in IBM® Cognos® software.

User locale refers to the product and content locales for each IBM Cognos user. Requests from users arrive with an associated locale. IBM Cognos software must determine the language and locale preferences of users and enforce an appropriate response locale when you distribute reports in different languages.

A user locale specifies the default settings that a user wants to use for formatting dates, times, currency, and numbers. IBM Cognos software uses this information to present data to the user.

IBM Cognos software obtains a value for user locale by checking these sources, in the order listed:

user preference settings
If the user sets the user preference settings in IBM Cognos Connection, IBM Cognos software uses these settings for the user's product and content locale and for default formatting options. The user preference settings override the values obtained from the authentication provider.
authentication provider
If the authentication provider has locale settings that are configured, IBM Cognos software uses these values for the user's product and content locale.
browser setting
Anonymous and guest users cannot set user preference settings. For these users, IBM Cognos software obtains a user locale from the browser stored on the user's computer.