What is the best place to set the Culture/UI Culture in an ASP.net MVC app
Currently I have a CultureController class which looks like this:
public class CultureController : Controller
{
public ActionResult SetSpanishCulture()
{
HttpContext.Session["culture"] = "es-ES";
return RedirectToAction("Index", "Home");
}
public ActionResult SetFrenchCulture()
{
HttpContext.Session["culture"] = "fr-FR";
return RedirectToAction("Index", "Home");
}
}
and a hyperlink for each language on the homepage with a link such as this:
<li><%= Html.ActionLink("French", "SetFrenchCulture", "Culture")%></li>
<li><%= Html.ActionLink("Spanish", "SetSpanishCulture", "Culture")%></li>
which works fine but I am thinking there is a more appropriate way to do this.
I am reading the Culture using the following ActionFilter
http://www.iansuttle.com/blog/post/ASPNET-MVC-Action-Filter-for-Localized-Sites.aspx. I am a bit of an MVC noob so am not confident I am setting this in the correct place. I don't want to do it at the web.config level, it has to be based on a user's choice. I also don't want to check their http-headers to get the culture from their browser settings.
Edit:
Just to be clear – I am not trying to decide whether to use session or not. I am happy with that bit. What I am trying to work out is if it is best to do this in a Culture controller that has an action method for each Culture to be set, or is there is a better place in the MVC pipeline to do this?
Best Answer
I'm using this localization method and added a route parameter that sets the culture and language whenever a user visits example.com/xx-xx/
Example:
I have a filter that does the actual culture/language setting:
To activate the Internationalization attribute, simply add it to your class:
Now whenever a visitor goes to http://example.com/de-DE/Home/Index the German site is displayed.
I hope this answers points you in the right direction.
I also made a small MVC 5 example project which you can find here
Just go to http://{yourhost}:{port}/en-us/home/index to see the current date in English (US), or change it to http://{yourhost}:{port}/de-de/home/index for German etcetera.