Hello,
I'm currently working with ASP.NET 2.0 to re-create one of our projects to have multi-lingual capabilities. I find pretty handy the fact that VS.NET 2005 generates the resources file per form automatically, however I've found some troubles while doing this generation.
I need to create static text content for some drop down lists. I put these resources in a global resources file and tried to access the resource unsuccesfully.
Here is what I did:
On the Global resources file I crated a resource for each item of the drop down list. On the drop down list I set the Expressions property for the DataText Field to be of type Resources (ie, Expression type: Resources), then on the ClassKey property I put the name of the Global resources file (App_GlobalResources, the name of the file is App_GlobalResources.en-US.resx) and on the ResourceKey the name of the resource (IndustryTypeItem).
My resources strings on the App_GlobalResources.en-US.resx look like this:
IndustryTypeItem1 All Industries
IndustryTypeItem2 Agricultural
IndustryTypeItem3 Industrial/Construction
IndustryTypeItem4 Outdoor Power
IndustryTypeItem5 Forestry
IndustryTypeItem6 Vehicles
IndustryTypeItem7 Recreational

Somehow the Explicit expressions are not properly generated and the drop down list shows and error on the Design View.
How can I troubleshoot this issue, is there a name convention that I'm missing somehow?
Thanks in advance,
Lizet

I forgot to mention the error I get on the design view:
"There was an error rendering the control. Property accessor DataTextField on object industryType threw the following exception: 'Object does not match target type'"

Nevermind to previous comments/questions, I finally found this site with the QuickStart app code and documentation:
http://beta.asp.net/QUICKSTART/aspnet/doc/localization/localization.aspx

Hrmmm, but the idea I got from the new meta:resourcekey="LocalResourceX" attribute and the implicit linking was that I didn't need any extra coding, that just by defining that LocalResourceX on each item of the dropdownlist, it would be automatically linked with the translated resource. So the translation team would just get this .resX files and do the translation.
It works now. It looks like before I had it linked (wrongly linked) to the global resource file and now I moved those dropdownlist items to the local resouce file. However, I would like to group most of my resources in the Global resources file (using just one file per culture in the web application would be a plus) This is a web app with several pages and it'll be hard to maintain if there is a resource file per page. Should I use the Explicit resource expression to link to the Global Resources always then? So the advantage of the automatic resource creation and linking is lost?
If I get your suggestion correctly, you would create an extra XML file for each list in the app and have an entry on the Global resource file for each of these xml files? I don't see how it could help, adding extra xml files to the existing resources.
Thanks for your reply,
Lizet

Couple comments on the article. First, I can’t believe anyone anywhere would ever recommend (or even think of) the idea of having database tables named dynamically per-culture. To make matters worse, I’m pretty sure you are recommending keeping said table names in a resource file. Wouldn’t that then impose the user of such a model to exclusively use dynamic SQL? Whatever your feeling is of dynamic SQL, surely we can all agree that a localization “architecture” shouldn’t have such a profound implementation impact on the entire system? To boot, you didn’t give any examples or explore this in any detail. Frankly, this is a core issue with localization which simply cannot be omitted in an article which is ‘All about the architecture’. Please reconsider telling people this is “best practice”, for a far more flexible and elegant solution, take a look at: http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/LocalizedSamplePart2.asp#databasedesign

While I haven’t played with localization features of 2.0 in great depth, I don’t believe they actually offer “strongly-typed resources”. All ASP.Net 2.0 offers is a strongly-typed resource manager and access to weakly-typed resources. I could be wrong, and I certainly hope I am. However, “strongly-typed resources” would imply that you could do: MyImageClass image= content.Login; and content.Login would return an “image”. As I understand it, resources are still either strings or binaries. If you want to localize the information about an image (height, width, alt, title, src) you’re SOL. Perhaps we are simply using different terminology, but if you truly can’t get a strongly-typed custom class, I would certainly advise, as best practice, against using the built-in resource manager.

Here are a couple more questions about 2.0. Is it easier to create custom cultures? Anyone who’s done real work on localization in 1.x should know that setting the thread’s UICulture is great, except for 1 thing…you are limited to supported CultureInfo types. Believe it or not, there are some unsupported cultures in .net. If you need to support such a culture (or ever plan on doing it), you’ll have to create your own culture (painfully). Alternatively you can create your own ResourceManager.

Another question, is the fallback/default culture still loaded with the main application assembly? If so does it still require a full recompile and deployment (app recycle in asp.net)? This can be costly for any shop that requires full/partial QA on any release.

It’s a shame controls still don’t support localization as first class properties. asp:literal resourceKey=”UserName” runat=”server” / is much considerably nicer than the %$ approach. What about handling substitution? For example, when your string is “Your password must be {minlength} character’s long”. Also for maintaining user’s culture information, it would be foolish to stray-away from the much-used (Microsoft.com) url rewriting approach.

So, to recap…specifically to your own work, I believe your data model to be of very poor design. As for the localization features in 2.0, I’d be interested to know if there’s a way to localize something other than a string/binary? How are unsupported cultures supported? Is a main-assembly recompile still necessary? And is there a way to set a control’s property declaratively other than %$ and support for substitution?

Yes, I’ve authored what I think is good best practice guide for 1.x at http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/localization_websites.asp and http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/LocalizedSamplePart2.asp much of the ideas come from the CommunityServer project…the ultimate best-practice guide. Unless 2.0 solves any of the real pitfalls of the resource manager and resource files, best practice will continue to be to not use it.

"Couple comments on the article. First, I can’t believe anyone anywhere would ever recommend (or even think of) the idea of having database tables named dynamically per-culture. To make matters worse, I’m pretty sure you are recommending keeping said table names in a resource file."


I agree with Karl about that, we use a locate table version of the tables to be translated in our DB, and send the culture asa parameter of the stored procedurs we call, this way we can use the following construction on our SPs to get the translated strings we need:
select case when l.description is not null then l.description else q.description end as description
from default_table q left join default_table_locate l
where l.culture=@culture

In ASP.NET 1.1 I used to group all the application resources in a single file, to do this in ASP.NET 2.0 I should use Global_Resources then and Explicit linking the resources, correct? Are this resources compiled as satellite assemblies? or I should recompile the web app each time a resource is changed?
I think I'll figure that out as soon as I pass all my Local REsources to the Global Resources file, but just wanted to know if this is a recommended practice for 2.0

regards,
Lizet

I hope we can talk more about this at TechEd. I know Michael Kaplan has a talk which will cover part of this. He is planning on talking about best-practice database design for localization.

I certainly don't want to say that there's only one way for all situations, but I really can't get past my vision of the implementation required for your approach (ie, dynamic sql). Say the current user's UICulture is "en-US" and you need to get all the products name/ids from the database, wouldn't your code look something like:

string tableName = tablesResourceManager.GetString("products");
string sql = "SELECT ProductId, ProductName From [" + tableName + "]"

Perhaps I'm missing something fundamental, but I just don't see how else you could do it. Even if you simply implied the table name from the culture, you'd still need to do something like:

"SELECT ProductId, ProductName FROM Products_" + @CultureName


The only alternative I can think of is to have huge if/else chains..

if @cultureName "en-US" begin
SELECT * FROM Products_en-US..
end else if @cu.....
...
end

Again, it can certainly be a limit in my own mental capability to come up with something clever :)

Something else of concern would be the maintenance aspect, changes to one schema need to be made to xxx tables. How do you split out globalized-specific information as to not replicate it, and how to deal with unique ids (guids?)

Michele,
"I need a more compelling argument to be convinced that page resources are that difficult to manage. Frankly I think it is just as difficult to manage localization process for 1 file as for 100 files...the process and automation is king."

I thought the versioning/deployment of the generated satellite assemblies would become a nightmare.

None of my grandmothers have websites, unfortunately, they had become good bloggers.

Lizet

Michele,
"To access shared application resources, use App_GlobalResources and explicit binding <%$ Resources: MyGlobalResource, ItemName %> "

I always get an error when try to use that construction on my Source View, and end up using a literal:
"open tag" asp:literal runat="server" Text="<%$ Resources: MMLSiteMaster.master, Title %>" "/close tag"

Lizet

"open tag" = '<'
"close tag" = '>'

Wow, my name was invoked and everything!

I should explain a bit about what Karl was referring to when he said:

"I know Michael Kaplan has a talk which will cover part of this. He is planning on talking about best-practice database design for localization. "

Karl may not be as happy with my talk as he thinks he will be -- most of what I talk about is *globalization* issues, rather than localization ones (his question that he sent to me was not specific to this particular issue being discussed here).

Hey Michael:
Yes, I might have misunderstood the specific topics of your session. I still think anyone reading this blog and attending TechEd would be grateful for the heads up about your presentation. Regardless of whether it discusses this particular issue, it should be worth while for those of us creating multilingual applications.

Karl

Michele, Karl and Michael,
Is there a way we could get the DVD with the Globalization and Localization subjects from
the TechEd 2005? It looks like you will be covering pretty much what we need. I've been keeping track of some presentations so far, but a DVD with the entire collection will be more than helpful. I think there was a DVD issued from the TechEd 2003 event, would it be a similar one this year? Thanks in advance,
Lizet

Michele,
Our team decided to develop and deploy the globalization project we have with VS 2003. Unfortunately, despite of the several advantages that VS 2005 has, the IDE would become unresponsive constantly and there are some other bugs that made us change our minds. So it was a decision to wait to the final release of VS 2005 to deploy any of our products with it. I don't know if we were extremely cautious here though. However we decided to supply one .resX file per page of the application to the translation team, from the project tracking perspective is a lot easier to follow up a resource file per form/per language than a main global one per language, so you were right about that. With the main global resource file, it is hard for the programmer to look for the particular resource name and for the project manager to keep track of what part of the application already supports Globalization.
I look forward to have the DVD with the conferences at Tech Ed 2005.
Cheers,
Lizet

Thanks Michele,
I saw the presentation online and asked some questions to the panel. I did miss the rest of the conferences on Globalization, so if you could gather the links it would be great! I truly appreciate it.
I know the DVD will have all the webcasts from TechEd. Although I'm focusing on Globalization now, the rest of the IT team at the company can benefit from the DVD as well.
Lizet