Globally enabling field-level fallback

Question

Using Sitecore 9.0.2, I'm looking to globally enable field-level language fallback. This seems like it should be easy to do, just go to the Field template and check on the box in the standard values. However, this doesn't appear to work properly.

I found this article from 2016 about the issue, and Sitecore suggested it was a bug and provided a patch: https://learnsitecorebasics.wordpress.com/tag/field-level-fallback/. But it seems like this is still present today and was never patched in.

Before I either get Sitecore to send me the v9 equivalent patch, or patch it myself in a similar style using dotPeek to find what needs fixing where, I wanted to check the community to see if others have this issue and there's a better way, beyond manually setting the checkbox on every field.

Answer 1

Sitecore support finally got back to me. This functionality is working in Sitecore 9.0.2, but it requires a setting that's not in the Sitecore.config and is currently undocumented. To get this to work, add the following setting in a patch:

<setting name="LanguageFieldFallback.AllowStandardValuesForSharedLanguageFallback" value="true" />

Then if you go to /sitecore/templates/System/Templates/Template field/_Standard Values and check on the Enable field level fallback option, you'll get fallback enabled on every field in your site. You can create a new language version to check that you see it working.

EDIT: Based on my comment where a further bug was identified, Sitecore did identify the bug and assigned it bug ID 257222. A patch (DLL/config) is available for 9.0.2 (I don't know about 8.2.7). If someone needs it, I can either provide it, or check with Sitecore support and reference the bug ID to get the patch. It appears to have fixed the issues I had.