Problem scenario:
Implement ASP.Net localization in a SaaS based application.
Additional complexity: The tenant should be able to edit the localized content. Thus, if the hosted application has 10 tenants with each supporting 5 languages, we could end up with 50 units of translation content.
Please suggest on what would be an ideal approach given the above scenario.
Listed below, are approaches used in the past (for my other applications) and why they are not relevant now:
Option 1:
ASP.Net resource files
Problem:
Only one language file is created per localizable resource (.aspx page). Hence, it is not possible to have one Home.aspx.resx file for each of the tenant translations.
Though the resx keys can be modified to contain the TenantId (lblFirstName_44) and stored in the same resx file, but then this would be difficult to maintain and we could end up with large files.
Option 2:
Storing multilingual content in dedicated database tables (Labels, Messages, MenuItems)
Problem:
This has worked well in the past (in scenarios where the end user requires dynamic update of localizable content). The earlier solution relied heavily on cached data, in case of a multi-tenant solution the data would require extensive caching per page – per tenant. The caching could also be done per content type (Labels, Messages, MenuItems)
An alternate approach could be to implement a custom resource provider (by building on .Net’s existing provider)
Option 3:
Third party open source solutions like FairlyLocal
Problem:
Although very simple to implement, suffers from the same drawback as .resx files – not designed for allowing the end user to modify the content and to maintain multiple versions (tenant-wise) of same file.
Note: In case of not finding another solution, we would probably go with Option 2
I’d go for the second option. Especially since your resource entries are subject to modifications, resex files are not an option as you have said.
. You can easily find a good resource provider such as westwind one or write a custom provider.