Localizing your web application with WSO2 Identity Server

An approach using Single Sign-On with SAML 2

An important aspect to consider when developing web applications is localization. For a web application that aims to serve customers of multiple regions, localization is vital to scale up the reach. The stickiness or the user retention of a web application hugely increases when it is able to adapt itself to suit the user’s locale. This includes conversion of units of measure and currencies, adapting local formats for phone numbers and dates, etc.

With federated authentication, WSO2 IS already served passing additional parameters to the IdP initiated SSO (Single Sign-On)URL. This could be achieved by making use of the “Additional Query Parameter” textbox but this had been restricted to static values. With WSO2 Carbon 4.4.X Update 2018–01–15, WSO2 IS 5.3.0 supports passing dynamic values to the query parameters. With this update, WSO2 IS paves the way for localization and the web applications can send the locale in the SSO URL to detect the language of the user to localize the web application consistently across interfaces.

A dynamic query parameter can be defined within {} as shown in the above example. Explaining with the above example, the SAML Request sent from the web application should contain a query parameter having the key lang (eg: lang=en). This will replace the value {lang} with en and append it to the IdP SSO URL as locale=en.

Based on the above, the query string parameters defined in the SAML request and how it is passed to the corresponding SSO URL are shown below.

After configuring the sample according to the documentation, additionally do the following.

2. Run the sample with the option “login with SAML from Identity Server”

You will see the string query parameters in the SAML request and the SSO URL similar to the above sample SAML request and the corresponding response.

Related posts:

Web3 is not here yet. So there is no such thing as a Web3 marketer. It’s bullshit. But it’s coming. And there will be marketers. All the Web2 marketers and people just getting interested in marketing…

The agile methodology is a project management approach that emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and iterative development. This methodology is characterized by a series of short, iterative…

As part of my series about “the five things we need to do to close the VC gender and racial gap” I had the pleasure of interviewing Valentina Milanova. Valentina Milanova, Founder of Daye, a…