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Internationalization - Do you make sure your language rule has an exception for Currency Fields?

Last updated by Jeoffrey Fischer [SSW] 8 months ago.See history

Currency formatting can vary significantly across cultures, and it's important to manage this effectively in your reports.

Although we can make the report support multiple cultures (as per Do you make sure your language follows the users regional settings?), we suggest you don't do this for currency fields. Instead:

  1. Have the Language set specifically to the culture you want. e.g. If you do a report for Australian Dollars, then it should be "English(Australia)"; if for Chinese Yuan, it should be "Chinese(People's Republic of China)". Because the format of currency should not change as per user's culture setting as $100 AUD <> 100 CNY !
  2. Have the currency column header set include the currency. Because $100 USD <> $100 AUD !

Figure: Bad example - Using default language for currency field

Figure: Good example - This currency field stores Australian Dollars and will always display it that way

Figure: AUD currency

Figure: Good example - This currency field stores Chinese Yuan and will always display it that way

Figure: Chinese Yuan currency

If you don't want to get currency fields hard coded in reports, you can use an expression to read settings from your database.

Figure: Good example - Using specified language as per value of column CurrencyType in table SystemValue

Jeoffrey Fischer
Reporting Services
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