CODEWITHSUNDEEP
asp.net-mvc-3asp.net-mvc-4resourcesmultilingual
SVI
SVI

Reputation: 951

Multilingual MVC 4 best practice

I know if I want to create a multilingual MVC4 application I would use resource files according to CultureInfo, but that would be useful for application's labels, messages, titles..etc, however I was thinking about defining a list of counties' names and their cities in many languages, now should I define them in a resource files (which can be exhausting) or should I use a table with many columns for each language?

And if I used resource files, how can I tell which country a user is from when he register in the system?

Which one is best practice? Is there any other approach?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 514

Answers (1)

dom
dom

Reputation: 6832

Using multiple columns for each language will work, but it will also get out of hand pretty quickly as more columns and languages need to be added down the road. So I'd advise against that approach.

What you can do however is move the columns that need to be localized to a different table with a compound primary key. Here's a simple example with a cities table :

enter image description here

You'll have classes that look somewhat like this :

// City.cs
public class City
{
    public int CityId { get; set; }
    public string UnlocalizedField1 { get; set; }
    public string UnlocalizedField2 { get; set; }

    // Optional
    public virtual List<CityTranslation> Translations { get; set; }
}

// CityTranslation.cs
public class CityTranslation
{
    public int CityId { get; set; }
    public string LanguageId { get; set; }
    public string LocalizedField1 { get; set; }
    public string LocalizedField2 { get; set; }
}

Then it becomes rather trivial to query your data in the language you need.

Upvotes: 1

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