One day I was asked by a firm's functional consultant that whether the Lightweight MLS configuration is worthwhile to try. After understanding their requirements, my answer is … take a try, but beware that it could break some customizations.
The requirement is pretty simple:
In item master, they want to have multilingual description (short and long), classification (or one of it's item category flexfield values) for some of the items. Right now about 5 languages are identified, but could be more if it works fine. They want to generate Sales Orders, Packing Slips, and AR Invoices in different languages, which contains the item descriptions and classification in such language.
The Oracle EBS user interface is English only for all users around the globe. It helps to standardize users' operations, training, and troubleshooting.
First of all, the Lightweight MLS is available in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.3 and higher. Don't try it you're using instance lower than 12.1.3.
Metalink doc 1077709.1 describes how to setup and operate it. In short, the whole process is similar to adding a new language in EBS, except you do not apply the NLS patch. For this requirement, they not even need to run the AFMSGSYNC.sql script to synchronize the message in English for different languages, since only English UI is used.
After adding a language, such language can be selected in the login page. So a small customization is needed to take it out.
For XML Publisher Reports – like Sales Order, Packing Slip. One way to redesign these reports is that an extra parameter -- language – is added for the request parameter. When user run this report, they need to select this parameter (or default by running OU), then this language code is passed to the query which contains MTL_SYSTEM_ITEMS_TL or other TL tables so that it can pick up the correct description in that language.
One can assigns different language in Concurrent Program (other than English) even in English UI. Using the Translation in XML Publisher report could able to reuse some the template that only the textual elements is language-dependent.
However, in real life I seems so many cases that every country has very specific business requirements that developers have to create different template for each country.
Other impact of Lightweight MLS is that if any reports make use of TL table without specify the language, then it could give multiple rows for a given line of data since it could multiple by the number of language added.
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