Question

working on internationalizating a web application, I am a bit blocked, because I don’t know how to make my .properties dinamic. I mean, to get automatically static text from the application. Now I have, for instance, this one MessageBundle_de_DE.properties:

greetings=Hallo!  
inquiry=Wie geth's?   
farewell=Tchüs!

But this is static, I wrote theese three couples (key, value).
How could I make my keys according to my application?? I guess this is possible, regarding on documentation.

Using Spring framework and JSP technology.

Thanks in advance, I know this is maybe too general question.

Answer 1

Since you’re using spring, add the following bean to your application context:

<bean id="messageSource" class="org.springframework.context.support.ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource">
    <property name="basename" value="/WEB-INF/messages/messages" />
    <property name="cacheSeconds" value="0" />
</bean>

In your /WEB-INF/messages folder, create all the messages.properties files that you need i.e. messages_en_GB.properties, messages_DE.properties etc.

Then in your jsps, use the following spring provided tag:

<spring:message code="some.property.name" />

By default the locale should be the locale your user has set in their browser. To allow them to select a different Locale (and thus the correct language), you can also add this to your application context:

<!-- Saves a locale change using a cookie -->
<bean id="localeResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.i18n.CookieLocaleResolver" />
<mvc:interceptors>
<!-- Changes the locale when a 'locale' request parameter is sent; e.g. /?locale=de -->
<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.i18n.LocaleChangeInterceptor" />
</mvc:interceptors>

Then, you just need links that include a locale property like /?local=de to change to a German translation.