Question

I am developing a multilingual site and was wondering what is the best way to store the language chosen by the user?

Either via QueryString or should it be in Session..or any other options?

Answer 1

I think it very much depends on how your application handles (desires to handle) the user languages. If your users have to log on to your site, then you probably have an account settings page somewhere with an appropriate user profile object or something similar behind. In such a case I guess you would save these settings on the DB, and when the user comes back to your site you get the user-information somehow (i.e. from a cookie), you load your user-profile object from the DB. The information would be kept in a session since I think that would be most suited in this case. If your users don’t have to login, so you basically cannot directly identify them, I would store the language settings in a cookie. This gives your user the value that he will always find the site in his preferred language when he comes back later (given that he doesn’t delete the cookies and the cookie’s lifetime is long enough). As a third possibility you could just identify the users language according to his default browser settings (just as ‘regex’ mentioned above).

As I said, it really depends on your application’s needs. What you have to keep in mind though is that

• objects stored in the session are kept on the server-side, using server memory. So don’t keep useless things there in memory if you don’t need them. However the session object is suited for storing data related to a user’s visit and configurations.
• Data stored in cookies, or the Viewstate object are send back and forth between the client browser and web server. So this causes additional traffic and may decrease the performance.

Bye