The visual appearance of the dashboards represents the national and cultural differences of its users. The design of WebSphere® Business Monitor dashboard views addresses such differences as language, calendar, and time in different countries and regions, and supports organizations that work in multicultural environments.
As a host of the dashboards, WebSphere Portal determines the global settings of the dashboard views. The global settings include the user’s preferred calendar system, time zone, and language. These global settings are configured through the user’s profile in WebSphere Portal. When a calendar type is selected in the user’s profile, the date values displayed in the views change to reflect the culture of the selected calendar type. For example, when you select an Islamic calendar type, the dates in the dashboard views change to represent Islamic months written in the user-selected language. You can select among various calendar types, such as Gregorian, Japanese, Taiwanese, Buddhist, and Islamic (Civil).
For the current release, Monitor Dashboards only support Gregorian calendar for date selection. The Gregorian calendar is used to specify a date range for generating a report or retrieving information. This calendar is used in the Reports, Export Values and Active Instances views.
The time zone settings also affect data presentation in the dashboard views with respect to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). When a time zone is selected, the displayed time values change to represent the selected time zone. For example, if you select GMT -6:00 (to indicate Central Time in the USA and Canada), the time shown on your dashboard views will be Central Time. Note that if no time zone is selected in the profile, the time values are displayed in the time zone of Runtime database.
The language settings control the language and formats of displayed data in the dashboard views. Interface data, like fields and labels, is written in English. The format of displayed data within the dashboard views is affected if the language changes. For example, if you select the Arabic language, the decimal numbers appear in Arabic format: a comma is used instead of a dot as the decimal sign. The calendar months also change to Arabic, regardless of the calendar type.