.NET Resources – Managing .resx Files for Multi-Language Applications

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I am currently developing a software for a multi languages environment using visual studio (en, fr and es). The soft is some kind of a 3d configurator, if I take the exemple of a car configurator, the user will choose all the spec (engine, chassis, color…) and the configurator give him a price and generate a 3d file.

For the first time, I have stored all my data (labels text, error message …) in several resources files (.resx), on per language.

I'm just in the beginning for the dev (less than 5%) but my first .resx is more than 1000 lignes long, and I'm wondering about maintenance and performances.

For managing resources files, I see 3 methods :

One big resources file per language.

  • That's what I'm doing right now

One resource file per application type and per language (label.en.resx, label.fr.resx ect..)

  • One for the labels
  • One for the error messages …

One resource file per machine type and per language (engine.en.resx, engine.fr.resx ect..)

  • One for the engine (with all its labels, error messages ect..)
  • One for the chassis …

What is the best practice for managing resources file ? Is there another better method ?

Best Answer

I'm wondering about maintenance and performance

The only performance issue you will run into is load time. That's one of the reasons why loading the appropriate resources should be a start-time concern. Typically that is handled by referencing the resources in a global.asax file (or the backing C# file).

Basics

Well, there's a number of things to consider here. With i18n resources, you only have to specify the resources that are different in your language. If the bulk of the resources are going to be the same as the native language resources, then the resources infrastructure handles failing back.

Let's say that core.resx has all the 3d models, and the default native languages for your app. Let's say your native language (as specified in your project file) is en. You would have the following:

core.resx    -- Defines models and EN messages/errors
core.es.resx -- Only defines ES messages/errors
core.fr.resx -- Only defines FR messages/errors

If the application is run in a Spanish native language machine, then the resource system will only pull the overrides from the core.es.resx, while delegating to core.resx for the actual 3d models.

What this means is that your main resource is very large, and that the language specific resource files are much smaller.

Best Practices?

There are no "best practices" per se here. A lot of how you split up your resources will be affected by the following:

  • How you organize your code
  • How your translation provider might want to split up work

Particularly with specialty language needs (like automobile parts), the translation house might have different people who are better versed in different specialty areas. Breaking up the resources to support that process may help speed up the work.

I might recommend at least bundling the resources around the "machine type" in your above scenario. All the necessary terms, labels, and error messages will be closely tied together. When you add a new chassis type, you only have to update one resource bundle. That would make maintenance a bit easier.

In this project, I chose to break things up by how I organized my code. The way I forced load at start up time was by declaring the resource managers in a static initializer. There's no reason in that project why I couldn't have merged them all into one resource bundle. It just made it easier to think about several parallel concepts as they were separate bundles.

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