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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T21:14:36+00:00

It’s not my intent to engage in a debate over validation in DDD, where

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It’s not my intent to engage in a debate over validation in DDD, where the code belongs, etc. but to focus on one possible approach and how to address localization issues. I have the following behavior (method) on one of my domain objects (entities) which exemplifies the scenario:

public void ClockIn()
{
    if (WasTerminated)
    {
        throw new InvalidOperationException("Cannot clock-in a terminated employee.");
    }

    ClockedInAt = DateTime.Now;
    :
}

As you can see, when the ClockIn method is called, the method checks the state of the object to ensure that the Employee has not been terminated. If the Employee was terminated, we throw an exception consistent with the “don’t let your entities enter an invalid state” approach.

My problem is that I need to localize the exception message. This is typically done (in this application) using an application service (ILocalizationService) that is imported using MEF in classes that require access to its methods. However, as with any DI framework, dependencies are only injected/imported if the object was instantiated by the container. This is typically not the case with DDD.

Furthermore, everything I’ve learned about DDD says that our domain objects should not have dependencies and those concerns should be handled external from the domain object. If that is the case, how can I go about localizing messages such as the one shown above?

This is not a novel requirement as a great many business applications require globalization/localization. I’d appreciate some recommendations how to make this work and still be consistent with the goals of a DDD.

UPDATE

I failed to originally point out that our localization is all database driven, so we do have a Localization Service (via the injectable ILocalizationService interface). Therefore, using the static Resources class Visual Studio provides as part of the project is NOT a viable option.

ANOTHER UPDATE

Perhaps it would move the discussion along to state that the app is a RESTful service app. Therefore, the client could be a simple web browser. As such, I cannot code with any expectation that the caller can perform any kind of localization, code mapping, etc. When an exception occurs (and in this approach, attempting to put the domain object into an invalid state is an exception), an exception is thrown and the appropriate HTTP status code returned along with the exception message which should be localized to the caller’s culture (Accept-Language).

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Not sure how helpful this response is to you, but localization is really a front-end concern. Localizing exceptions messages as per your example is not common practice, as end users shouldn’t see technical details such as those described in exception messages (and whoever will be troubleshooting your exceptions probably has a sufficient level English even if it is not their native language).

    Of course if necessary you can always handle exceptions and present a localized, user-friendly message to your users in your front-end. But keeping it as a font-end concern should simplify your architecture.

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