Enable and set up language fallback

For each language in your environment that you want to use for language fallback, you need to specify the language that you want it to fall back to. The fallback language specified on a language definition item applies to all the fields and items that have language fallback enabled.

You can set up a chain of language fallback. For example, as illustrated in the picture, Korean falls back to Spanish, and Spanish falls back to English. Suppose there is no Korean nor Spanish versions, then the English version of the item or field is shown.

To define the language fallback rules:

If not already enabled, you can enable language fallback for all the sites in your environment by changing the settings in the \App_Config\Sitecore\Services.GraphQL\Sitecore.Services.GraphQL.EdgeContent.config file. Changing the configuration file also affects existing sites.

You can enable language fallback for items or fields, or both.

To enable language fallback for an environment:

<setting name="ExperienceEdge.EnableItemLanguageFallback" value="false"/>
<setting name="ExperienceEdge.EnableFieldLanguageFallback" value="false"/>

If you are using the Page builder, you must enable language fallback for a site after enabling it for the entire environment. This is to ensure that the Page builder user interface displays language fallback options for datasource items.

To enable language fallback for a site:

On all the individual items or item templates where you want to use language fallback, you need to enable item-level fallback. Enabling language fallback on an item template affects all items that are based on the template.

To enable item-level fallback:

If you want to use field-level language fallback, you need to enable field-level language fallback on every relevant field definition of an item template. You can do this for a specific language version of a field, or for all language versions of the field.

To enable language fallback on a field definition item:

Manually enabling field-level fallback can be time-consuming, so to automate this process and perform a batch update of the field-level fallback settings, you can use the Sitecore Powershell Extensions module with the following sample script:

$database = "master"
$path = "/sitecore/templates/Project/TestSite"
$sourcePath = "${database}:${path}"

# Get all items including root
$items = @(Get-Item -Path $sourcePath) + (Get-ChildItem -Path $sourcePath -Recurse)

# Filter by template name
$targetItems = $items | Where-Object { $_.TemplateName -eq 'Template field' }

# List of edited items
$editedItems = @()

foreach ($item in $targetItems) {
    Write-Host "Processing: Item ID: $($item.ID) | Item Name: $($item.Name)"

    $field = $item.Fields["Enable Shared Language Fallback"]
    if ($field -and $field.Value -ne "1") {
        # Modify field value
        $item.Editing.BeginEdit()
        try {
            $field.Value = "1"
            $editedItems += $item
            Write-Host "✔ Enabled field language fallback: $($item.ID) | Field value: $($field.Value) | Path: $($item.Paths.Path)" -ForegroundColor Green
        }
        finally {
            $item.Editing.EndEdit() | Out-Null
        }
    }
}

# Final report
if ($editedItems.Count -eq 0) {
    Write-Host "`n--- No items required field-level fallback update ---"
}
else {
    Write-Host "`n--- Updated items with field-level fallback ---"
    $editedItems | ForEach-Object {
        Write-Host "Edited: $($_.Paths.FullPath) | ID: $($_.ID)"
    }
}