Question

I have inherited from a very small ASP.NET WebForms project, and my customer would like to add a second language to it.

For every “somepage.aspx”, I’d like to support a “second language path” version of it, like “fr/somepage.aspx”. I’d like to handle this using normal globalization (CurrentCulture + resource files in both languages) and avoid having to duplicate each page. I must keep the original paths valid, thus I have excluded ASP.NET MVC for now (for lack of knowing if I could continue to support “.aspx” paths).

Is this possible?

Answer 1

URL Routing is avalaible in for ASP.NET.

You could create two routes, the first being the route that catches your language:

{language}/{page}

The second route would be just

{page}

In MVC we can create route constraints that would enforce the Language to be of a specific value (so like en, en-us, etc) I’m not positive if the same can be done in regular ASP.NET WebForms routing.

Here are two articles that describe the topic of routing in WebForms (non-MVC)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd347546.aspx

and

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/10/13/url-routing-with-asp-net-4-web-forms-vs-2010-and-net-4-0-series.aspx

EDITED TO ADD CODE SAMPLE

In my Global.asax I registered the following:

    void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
    {
        routes.Ignore("{resource}.asxd/{*pathInfo}");
        routes.Add(
            new Route(
                "{locale}/{*url}", //Route Path
                null, //Default Route Values
                new RouteValueDictionary{{"locale", "[a-z]{2}"}}, //constraint to say the locale must be 2 letters. You could also use something like "en-us|en-gn|ru" to specify a full list of languages
                 new Utility.Handlers.DefaultRouteHandeler() //Instance of a class to handle the routing
            ));

    }


    void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        // Code that runs on application startup
        RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);

    }

I also created a seperate Class (see asp.net 4.0 web forms routing – default/wildcard route as a guide.)

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Compilation;
using System.Web.Routing;
using System.Web.UI;

namespace SampleWeb.Utility.Handlers
{
    public class DefaultRouteHandeler:IRouteHandler
    {
        public IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext)
        {
            //Url mapping however you want here: 

            string routeURL = requestContext.RouteData.Values["url"] as string ;

            string pageUrl = "~/" + (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(routeURL)? routeURL:""); 

            var page = BuildManager.CreateInstanceFromVirtualPath(pageUrl, typeof(Page))
                       as IHttpHandler;
            if (page != null)
            {
                //Set the <form>'s postback url to the route 
                var webForm = page as Page;
                if (webForm != null)
                    webForm.Load += delegate
                    {
                        webForm.Form.Action =
                        requestContext.HttpContext.Request.RawUrl;
                    };
            }
            return page;
        }
    }
}

This works because when no locale is specified in the URL the default view engine for Web Forms takes over. It also works when a 2 letter locale (en? us? etc) is used. In MVC we can use an IRouteConstraint and do all kinds of checking, like making sure the locale is in a list, checking to see if the path exists, etc but in WebForms the only option for a constraint is using a RouteValueDictonary.

Now, I know there is an issue with the code as-is, default documents don’t load. So http://localhost:25436/en/ does not load the default document of default.aspx, but http://localhost:25436/en/default.aspx does work. I’ll leave that to you to resolve.

I tested this with sub directories and it works.