C# – Building a language switcher – 2 languages only – ASP.NET MVC

asp.net-mvcc++switch-statement

ASP.NET MVC app, close to completion, then it was decided that it needed a language switcher. It will simply be two languages: English and Japanese. They should be able to switch between the two, but if one is not selected it should choose whichever is the default language of the browser.

I'm wondering what the best solution would be in this case.

First thought, routes! So I change the routes to have a /{l} on the end of every route, and defaulted l = "". Then, in my BaseController (every controller is based off of it), I check the l variable in the route. Each action returns a view based on the language.

I wanted to simply be able to hack /ja-jp on the end of the url, and it would show the view in Japanese. It didn't quite seem to route correctly. Then, I was real bad in my views and hand coded the links… I couldn't quite get the helper to output the right links at first… and got into a bad habit of hand coding them. So, I'd have to re-code every link again – to hack the language variable on the end.

Second thought… ok, use jQuery to append the language variable to all anchor's href. That seems overly clumsy and difficult in certain situations where hrefs are hidden until needed, etc…

So… at this point I've decided to just do whatever it takes. What is the most elegant way to switch between 2 languages – without using resource files? I simply want the action to choose between 2 views, based on language.

Do I rewrite every link I've got to use the Html helper and then get the routes working? Then in the BaseController just set the language to English if their is no value?

Any advice is much appreciated, thank you.

Best Solution

I think one of the most easiest and user-friendly method is to use the domain (sub-domain actually) to identify what language it speaks. It doesn't need to change almost anything in the Html helper (those HTML.ActionLink) since it works only relatively to domain. Also, it might looks neat to user that when seeing that domain, they know exactly what language it supposed to be, and without making the url too long. All you need to do is to do something in the language switcher to work.

No matter what approach, I strongly discourage using the second thought, since you can't deny (even 0.1%) people not having javascript to work to visit your japanese web site, right?

Related Solutions

Asp.net-mvc – Compile Views in ASP.NET MVC

From the readme word doc for RC1 (not indexed by google)

ASP.NET Compiler Post-Build Step

Currently, errors within a view file are not detected until run time. To let you detect these errors at compile time, ASP.NET MVC projects now include an MvcBuildViews property, which is disabled by default. To enable this property, open the project file and set the MvcBuildViews property to true, as shown in the following example:

<Project ToolsVersion="3.5" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
  </PropertyGroup>

Note Enabling this feature adds some overhead to the build time.

You can update projects that were created with previous releases of MVC to include build-time validation of views by performing the following steps:

Open the project file in a text editor.
Add the following element under the top-most <PropertyGroup> element: <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
At the end of the project file, uncomment the <Target Name="AfterBuild"> element and modify it to match the following:

<Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'">
    <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp" PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" />
</Target>

C# – How to create a dropdownlist from an enum in ASP.NET MVC

For MVC v5.1 use Html.EnumDropDownListFor

@Html.EnumDropDownListFor(
    x => x.YourEnumField,
    "Select My Type", 
    new { @class = "form-control" })

For MVC v5 use EnumHelper

@Html.DropDownList("MyType", 
   EnumHelper.GetSelectList(typeof(MyType)) , 
   "Select My Type", 
   new { @class = "form-control" })

For MVC 5 and lower

I rolled Rune's answer into an extension method:

namespace MyApp.Common
{
    public static class MyExtensions{
        public static SelectList ToSelectList<TEnum>(this TEnum enumObj)
            where TEnum : struct, IComparable, IFormattable, IConvertible
        {
            var values = from TEnum e in Enum.GetValues(typeof(TEnum))
                select new { Id = e, Name = e.ToString() };
            return new SelectList(values, "Id", "Name", enumObj);
        }
    }
}

This allows you to write:

ViewData["taskStatus"] = task.Status.ToSelectList();

by using MyApp.Common