Question

My understanding is that when you set CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture to for instance “da-DK” it will look for resource files in “da-DK”, then “da”, then fall back to the invariant culture. This works well for Desktop applications, because operating systems are not typically multi-lingual. For websites however this is not necessarily the case.

Let say I have a visitor whose browser insists the user wants “da_DK”, “de_DE” and “en_GB”, that is Danish if it exists, then German, then British English as a fallback.

Is there any way to accommodate this preference using the .Net 4 localization framework?

And no, this is not a thought experiment. 🙂

EDIT

Just to be clear, the problem is not getting the localization headers from the web request. The problem is setting the CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture in such a way that it will check resource files in order, rather than just checking for one.

Alternatively a way to check whether the CurrentUICulture has matching resx files.

Answer 1

I think this is what you are after :

HttpRequest.UserLanguages()

This returns the array of user languages in preference order. Probably a good idea to allow them to change whatever localization you apply against this information, however, in case their browser configuration does not accurately reflect what they really want.

Update :

To check if the resources exist use :

ResourceManager.GetResourceSet

Here you can set tryParents to false. The method will return null if no resources exist. You can then proceed to try the next preferred culture returned in the header.