Question

Many times, when generating messages to show to the user, the message will contain a number of something that I want to inform the customer about.

I’ll give an example: The customer has selected a number of items from 1 and up, and has clicked delete. Now I want to give a confirmation message to the customer, and I want to mention the number of items he has selected to minimize the chance of him making a mistake by selecting a bunch of items and clicking delete when he only wants to delete one of them.

One way is to make the generic message like this:

int noofitemsselected = SomeFunction();
string message = "You have selected " + noofitemsselected + " item(s). Are you sure you want to delete it/them?";

The “problem” here is the case where noofitemselected is 1, and we have to write item and it instead of items and them.

My normal solution will be something like this

int noofitemsselected = SomeFunction();
string message = "You have selected " + noofitemsselected + " " + (noofitemsselected==1?"item" : "items") + ". Are you sure you want to delete " + (noofitemsselected==1?"it" : "them") + "?";

This gets quite long and quite nasty really fast if there are many references to the numbers plurality inside the code, and the actual message gets hard to read.

So my questions is simply. Are there any better ways of generating messages like this?

EDIT

I see a lot of persons has got very hung up in the case that I mentioned that the message should be displayed inside a message box, and has simply given an answer of how to avoid using the message box at all, and that is all good.

But remember that the problem of pluralization also apply to texts other places in the program in addition to message boxes. For example, a label alongside a grid displaying the number of lines selected in the grid will have the same problem regarding pluralization.

So this basically apply to most text that is outputted in some way from programs, and then the solution is not as simple as to just change the program to not output text anymore 🙂

Answer 1

If there is ever any chance, no matter how small, that this app will need to be translated to other languages then both are wrong. The correct way of doing this is:

string message = ( noofitemsselected==1 ?
  "You have selected " + noofitemsselected + " item. Are you sure you want to delete it?":
  "You have selected " + noofitemsselected + " items. Are you sure you want to delete them?"
);

This is because different languages handle plurality differently. Some like Malay don’t even have syntactic plurals so the strings would generally be identical. Separating the two strings makes it easier to support other languages later on.

Otherwise if this app is meant to be consumed by the general public and is supposed to be user friendly then the second method is preferable. Sorry but I don’t really know a shorter way of doing this.

If this app is meant to be consumed only internally by your company then do the shortcut "item(s)" thing. You don’t really have to impress anybody when writing enterprisy code. But I’d advise against doing this for publicly consumed app because this gives the impression that the programmer is lazy and thus lower their opinion of the quality of the app. Trust me, small things like this matter.