Question

I am working on .NET 4.0 MVC3 web application. The application is all in English and allows users to fill information regarding different regions. For simplicity let’s say we have two regions: United States and Western Europe.

Now in the view I present a string let’s say Project opening, but if the user works on region United States I would like it to read Project initiation.

When I think about this functionality I immediately think about resource files for different regions, but independent from the UI culture.

Does anyone have a recipe how to achieve what I want?

Would be also nice, if in the future I could make it read e.g. ExtendedDisplayAttribute(string displayName, int regionId) placed over properties of my ViewModels.

EDIT

I am already at the stage where I can access region information in a helper that should return the string for this region. Now I have a problem with the resource files. I want to create multiple resource files with failover mechanism. I expected there would be something working out of the box, but the ResourceManager cannot be used to read resx files.

Is there any technique that will allow me to read the values from specific resource files without some non-sense resgen.exe?

I also do not want to use System.Resources.ResXResourceReader, because it belongs to System.Windows.Forms.dll and this is a Web app.

Answer 1

Just in case someone wants to do the same in the future. This article turned out to be really helpful: http://www.jelovic.com/articles/resources_in_visual_studio.htm

The piece of code that I use (VB) is:

<Extension()>
Public Function Resource(Of TModel)(ByVal htmlHelper As HtmlHelper(Of TModel), resourceKey As String) As MvcHtmlString
    Dim regionLocator As IRegionLocator = DependencyResolver.Current.GetService(GetType(IRegionLocator))

    Dim resources = New List(Of String)
    If Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(regionLocator.RegionName) Then
        resources.Add(String.Format("Website.Resources.{0}", regionLocator.RegionName))
    End If
    resources.Add("Website.Resources")

    Dim value = String.Empty
    For Each r In resources
        Dim rManager = New System.Resources.ResourceManager(r, System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly())
        rManager.IgnoreCase = True

        Try
            value = rManager.GetString(resourceKey)
            If Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(value) Then
                Exit For
            End If
        Catch

        End Try
    Next

    Return New MvcHtmlString(value)
End Function