Morphing Reports to Accommodate the User’s Native Language

When working with reports that will be accessed from all over the world, you have to judiciously adapt the reports to meet the language requirements of the host browser (and the user). SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) makes these adaptations fairly easy because it provides the User.Language constant, which is extracted from the user's browser language settings. In reports that need to support multiple languages, you can use the User.Language constant to display a language-specific version of the report to the user.

Related: SSRS How-To: Create Reports by User toProtect Sensitive Data

When you create reports that support multiple languages and that include monetary values, there's a serious problem that you need to be aware of. If you don't set the text box's Language property to match the currency type being presented, the values are displayed using the browser's localized language setting. Although that seems reasonable on the surface, what it really means is that the monetary values in your columns are displayed using the localized currency prefix, such as the $ (dollar), € (euro), ¥ (yen), or £ (pound) symbol. This can radically change the information shown in the report because the money amounts don't change, just the currency symbol.

Setting the Language property doesn't fully address the problem. Consider that simply showing a cell with $100.50 doesn't necessarily mean that someone in Canada or Australia (or another country that uses the $ symbol for its currency) understands that the value being shown is in US dollars. I suggest that you add the appropriate currency abbreviation (e.g., USD, CAD, AUD) to any report that will have an international audience.