Localizing ASP.NET MVC

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Introduction

Localization is the process of customizing your application for a given culture and locale. The .NET framework offers the following namespaces and classes to facilitate the localization.

1. System.Globalization (The System.Globalization namespace contains classes that define culture-related information, including the language, the country/region, the calendars in use, the format patterns for dates, currency, and numbers, and the sort order for strings)
2. CutureInfo provides information about a specific culture.
3. The System.Resources namespace provides classes and interfaces that allow developers to create, store, and manage various culture-specific resources used in an application.

In this article, I will examine how to localize ASP.NET MVC application using existing .NET Framework. To create a new MVC project, see ASP.NET MVC application structure. Now, I will create a App_GlobalResources folder that will have the application resource files. To create a resource file in App_GlobalResources folder, follow these steps:

1. Right-click your project –> Add –> Add ASP.NET Folder –> App_GlobalResources
2. Right-click App_GlobalResources –> Add –> New Item –> Resources file

I will create two resource files English and French respectively. Now, I will change the "Access Modifier" settings to "Public" as shown below:

Using the Code

Now I can access the resource setting in a strongly typed way as shown below in my view:

The easiest way to determine the visitor's preferred culture is to add culture="auto" and uiCulture="auto" in web.config as shown below:

<system.web>
<globalization culture="auto" uiCulture="auto"/>

However, this approach will not work when rendering a view using a different view engine or if the client setting is invalid. So I will assign the given culture in a global.asax as shown below:

 protected void Application_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
 {
     CultureInfo culture = new CultureInfo("fr-CA");
     Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = culture;
     Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = culture;
 }

This will make sure that the current thread will apply the given culture. Now I will run the project and it will render a view as shown below:

Summary

In this article, we examined how to localize ASP.NET MVC applications using existing .NET Framework.