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The API Developer Portal (Enhanced Experience 5.x) needs to have full built-in localization support out of the box

  • 1.  The API Developer Portal (Enhanced Experience 5.x) needs to have full built-in localization support out of the box

    Posted Jan 27, 2022 09:40 AM
    Edited by Yanick Girouard Jan 27, 2022 09:44 AM

    For non-English customers, being able to provide a completely localized experience to its user base is paramount. In previous versions of the API Developer Portal (i.e. 3.5), it was possible to do so out of the box. However, since the later versions of the API Developer Portal (Enhanced Experience), Broadcom has taken the decision to not allow localization of the API Developer Portal and instead decided to create a separate product (the API Hub) to allow customers to customize the experience to their liking.

    Unfortunately, the API Hub in question falls short on several aspects:

    • The custom API Hub requires intensive in-house development and support, which is not always available
    • It only allows some level of interaction with the Developer Portal (through the Portal PAPI), but the workhorse doing all the work is still the Developer Portal
    • The API Hub that comes out of the box offers limited localization and doesn't have an option to set the default language for first-time users
    • The API Hub that comes out of the box doesn't allow for managing Organizations, which means Org Admins that wish to manage their users in their own language (i.e. French) can't do so without having to login to the Developer Portal itself, which is only in English
    • The API Hub doesn't allow for customizing the email templates that are sent to users, so even if they select French as their language, they will still be receiving unilingual English messages.
    • The out of the box API Hub is a sub-url of the Developer Portal (/apihub), which means that we can't easily prevent non-English users from accessing the English-only Developer Portal without relying on intelligent load balancing/redirection.

    For all these reasons and more, the proposed API Hub is not a straightforward solution that replaces the localization options that were provided by the previous versions of the portal. Users that wish to upgrade from the 3.5 portal to this version have quite a surprise when they realize this.

    Since some companies are legally obligated to provide a non-English experience to their users, I would therefore like to request that the Developer Portal has full localization support for all static and dynamic content, email templates, and user profiles. The Portal should provide a mean to set the default language to be used and should also store the language preference of users in their profiles (in the database) and not in the local storage of the browser (which is volatile).



  • 2.  RE: The API Developer Portal (Enhanced Experience 5.x) needs to have full built-in localization support out of the box

    Posted Feb 04, 2022 05:03 AM
    I have same opinion.

    At least, I think, the API Dev Portal EE should support UTF-8 encoding as fully as it can. I hope that QA team check the supporting non-English before release new version.

    I don't have another place to relay my customer's compaining, so let me write some case here.

    The API spec page has broken characters when upload UTF-8 encoded non-English swagger file. It is not fixed for almost 1 year after report it. The support engineer said that the broken character issue has very low low priority because there is workaround with PAPI. So only the admin user could create API spec page not api owner.
    Still I think "1 year" is too long time for just fixing to read utf-8 contents. I think the major and basic fuction of API Dev Portal should not have any bug. They are not added function for enhancement.

    Second case is what I didn't report to support team for years.
    The non-English field description of the Policy Template is broken. So, I should always modifiy the "Portal Tenant Sync Policy Template" of API Gateway to upport UTF-8 encoding whenever update the portal integration.

    ​I don't know there is more cases but we've guided to my customers use English except decription-like fields.