Defaulting regional settings when creating business users

[marcus_echter]

When creating business users out of employees or service agents, the user's regional settings get defaulted based on a specific algorithm. This blog describes how the defaulting logic for regional settings works in detail.

The business user screen contains a section called "Regional Settings" which contains the following fields:

• Decimal Notation


• Date Format


• Time Format


• Time Zone


• Language

These fields get pre-populated once the user has been created out of the corresponding business partner (employee or service agent) with the following logic:

The system always tries to derive the default values for the regional settings based on the country/region of the corresponding business partner. The defaulting logic works different for each field. You can see the default value determination in the following table.

Field	Default Value (derived from assigned business partner)
Decimal Notation	based on country
Date Format	based on country
Time Format	based on country
Time Zone	directly from address / based on country / based on country and region
Language	based on country, result must be an active display language as per business configuration. If the result is not an active display language, a default must be determined based on the tenant or organization of the business partner. Any result must be an active display language. Ultimate default is “English”

The complexity of the defaulting logic lies in the identification of the correct address instance which is used to uniquely derive all of the the above values. This is because the business partner model has multiple address types - such as workplace address or private address - each of them having their own country and region. The access sequence of the defaulting algorithm is as follows:

1. Employee workplace address


2. Organisational unit address


3. Private address


4. Company address


5. Service agent workplace address

The algorithm continues to find an address instance in the above order starting with 1. until all of the regional settings can be derived uniquely. This is the case when the address has a country (needed for the decimal and date/time formats as well as language) and

• The country has only a single time zone or


• the combination of country and region uniquely determines a time zone or


• the time zone has been specified explicitly.

For example, some addresses may not allow a unique determination of the time zone, e.g. because country "US" has multiple time zones and no additional data such as region may be present in the address. If this is the case the algorithm continues to access the next address instance in the mentioned sequence and tries again a unique derivation based on the new address.

If no unique derivation for all fields is possible after processing step 5. above the defaulting of the regional settings happens based on tenant-wide defaults:

Field	Default Value (derived from tenant settings)
Decimal Notation	“1.234.567,89”
Date Format	“DD.MM.YYY”
Time Format	24-hour format (15:05:10)
Time Zone	time zone maintained via fine tuning activity “Time Zone Maintenance”, else "UTC"
Language	"English"

This concludes the algorithm for defaulting the user's regional settings.