Internationalization (i18n)

Providing customized labels and messages for your application is done using the i18n files (whether you have multilingual requirements or not -- if not, you only have one version of the file in the primary language of your application).
To show or hide warnings in the logs regarding missing labels or messages, set the property "i18nWarnings" in properties/xava.properties to true or false respectively.

Labels

The label source file(s) are found in the i18n folder of your project, named <app>-labels_<lang>.properties (e.g. MySchool-labels_en.properties), and are copied by the build script into web/WEB-INF/classes folder.
Your labels are applied in addition to the label source files provided by OpenXava project (which are found in the ../OpenXava/i18n folder, are named Labels_<lang>.properties, and are also copied by the build script into your web/WEB-INF/classes folder). If the same entry appears in your file(s) and the OpenXava file(s), the one in your file will be used, which allows you the ability to customize the labels provided by OpenXava.
Comments can be included using # as the first character.
Blank lines are allowed, and can be useful to visually separate things for easier reading.

Application Name

App name and description can be overridden like this:

MySchool=School ABC
MySchool[description]=Welcome to the School ABC application

In general, many OpenXava items in this file can have [description] entries -- in the above example, the standard OX welcome page displays the app description. In most other cases, the [description] text is used for tool-tips that pop up when the mouse is hovered over the field.
Note that if you wish to have a very verbose tooltip, you can embed special characters to help with formatting. Specifically, as of this writing, the newline (\n) and tab (\t) work fine. As an example, this entry
studyId[description]=Unique Identifier per study \n See if this wraps... \n and this...\n\t try a tab....
will produce the expected behavior.

Module Name

Module name labels can be overridden like this:

Classroom.module=Class Room

Field Name

Fields which are used in many places in the application can be overridden globally like this:

addressGroup=Street Address

Specific module field names can be overridden like this:

Classroom.location=Door Badge

For associations, there is often a qualified field, which can be overridden like this:

Project.currentManager.managerName=PM Name

For the default view, so it has only effect in detail mode:

Customer.view.name=Customer Name

For a specific view, for the view named "Simple" in this example:

Customer.views.Simple.name=C Name

In List mode, qualified names are automatically qualified by OpenXava like this: Manager name of Current manager. If this is not desired, it can be overridden like this:

Project.tab.properties.currentManager.managerName=PM Name

or for a specific named Tab like this:

Project.tabs.my_tab_name.properties.currentManager.managerName=PM Name

or globally for all modules like this:

*.tab.properties.currentManager.managerName=PM Name

@View Section and Group Names

Section and Group names in an @View can be overridden as well. For example, if I have a section name "s_overview" and a group "g_pgm_dates" defined in a @View in Entity Program, the labels can be overridden like this:

Program.s_overview=Overview
g_pgm_dates=Program Milestone Dates

Note that as of OpenXava 5.4, Group names do not seem to support any dot-notation.

Actions

Action button names can be overridden using the format <Controller-name>.<action-name> like this:

ListProjectsForProgram.listProjects=List Projects

Organization

The organization name is shown in reports and it is specified with the xava.organization entry, thus:

xava.organization=My Company Inc

Messages

The message source file(s) are also found in the i18n folder of your project, named <app>-messages_en.properties (e.g. MySchool-messages_en.properties), and are copied by the build script to the web/WEB-INF/classes folder.
Your messages are applied in addition to the message source files provided by OpenXava project (which are found in the ../OpenXava/i18n folder, are named Messages_<lang>.properties, and are also copied by the build script into your web/WEB-INF/classes folder). If the same entry appears in your file(s) and the OpenXava file(s), the one in your file will be used, which allows you the ability to customize the messages provided by OpenXava.

Tooltips

To define a tooltip add the suffix [description] in the labels i18n file of your project, for the element (action, property, etc) where you want the tooltip. For example, with next entry in your labels file:

Warehouse.number[description]=Id number of the warehouse

You get:

Since v5.8 if the label and the tooltip matches the tooltip is not shown.

Placeholder (new in v5.8)

To define a placeholder for a field add the suffix [placeholder] in the labels i18n file of your project. For example, with the next entry in your labels file:

Color.number[placeholder]=Your num.