Question

I am working on Spring web application and my application is multilingual. I have created the ResourceBundle property files as messages.properties and messages_ar.properties.

In my start page, I have set by default the locale to English. through:

<fmt:setLocale value="en" scope="session"/>

On the same page, I have provided users with access to other language (Arabic) through a link as :

<a href="index.htm?locale=ar">Arabic Version</a>

And I load the form texts, page title and other common elements from the properties file through the spring message tag:

<spring:message code="title"/>

Application works fine for English, but when I select the arabic version, the values from meaages_ar.properties is not loaded. What is my mistake or how can it be loaded and the application be made multilingual.

Thanks in advance for the help.
Regards,
Abdel Olakara

Answer 1

Spring MVC does a very good job in supporting internationalization. You can register a LocaleChangeInterceptor in your application context to get this stuff done. Here is an example how this would look like in Spring 3 and the new mvc namespace.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc"
    xsi:schemaLocation="
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-3.0.xsd">

    <!-- use the annotation driven programming model -->
    <mvc:annotation-driven />

    <!-- register interceptors -->
    <mvc:interceptors>
        <!-- change the locale when a request parameter locale is received e.g. /?locale=de -->
        <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.i18n.LocaleChangeInterceptor" />
    </mvc:interceptors>

    <!-- save the locale using a cookie -->
    <bean id="localeResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.i18n.CookieLocaleResolver" />

    <!-- associate view names with jsp files in the directory /WEB-INF/views/ -->
    <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
        <property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/views/"/>
        <property name="suffix" value=".jsp"/>
    </bean>

</beans>

You can find more details in the section of the official documentation:
http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/1.2.9/reference/mvc.html#mvc-localeresolver

There is also a very helpful sample application in the speing examples repository:
https://src.springframework.org/svn/spring-samples/mvc-basic/