I'm trying to implement localization with routes
I have the following:
routes.MapRoute( "DefaultLocalized",
"{lang}/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
new { controller = "Home",
action = "Index",
id = "",
lang = "en" }
);
routes.MapRoute( "Default",
"{controller}/{action}/{id}",
new { controller = "Home",
action = "Index",
id = "" }
);
When I call my page domain/en/home/index
, it works fine but when i call domain/home/index
I get error 404: resource cannot be found.
Also when I'm at domain/en/home/index
and I click a secured page I get redirected to domain/Account/login
how can I be redirected to domain/en/Account/login
?
Also when I get an application error how can I be redirected to domain/en/home/error
?
The real question is how can I implement localization with language as a route parameter?
Localization is the process of adapting software to meet the requirements of local markets and different languages. You can change the messages that are displayed in the Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC helpers by including an additional script file in the document.
To offer a website in multiple languages using ASP.Net we simply need to add some resource. resx files to our project and voilà. Based on the language of the browser, IIS will match the localization resource.
App localization involves the following: Make the app's content localizable. Provide localized resources for the languages and cultures you support. Implement a strategy to select the language/culture for each request.
Localization is the process of customizing the globalized web application to a specific locale and culture. Various resources such as images and text for the specific locale are created. The resource file in localization is scoped to a particular page in an application.
The routes will match, by default, left-to-right, so "domain/home/index" will match first to lang=domain, controller=index, action (default to index), id (default to 0/null).
To fix this, I believe you can specify a regex on the MapRoute (matching, for example, languages with exactly 2 characters) - it has changed at some point, though... (sorry, no IDE at the moment, so I can't check exactly).
From memory, it might be:
routes.MapRoute( "DefaultLocalized",
"{lang}/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
new { controller = "Home",
action = "Index",
id = "",},
new { lang = "[a-z]{2}" }
);
Note that you probably aren't going to want every action to take a "string lang", so you should handle the "lang" part of the route either in a base-controller, or an action-filter (in either case, presumably add the info to the ViewData).
I know this is a very old question, but having just had to solve the complete set of related issues, I thought I would share my solution.
Below is a complete solution, including a few extra tricks to allow easy changing of language. It allows for specific cultures, not just specific languages (but only the language part is retained in this example).
This new routing includes a constraint (as others also suggest) to ensure the language route does not grab certain standard paths. There is no need for a default language value as that is all handled by the LocalisationAttribute
(see step 2).
public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
...
// Special localisation route mapping - expects specific language/culture code as first param
routes.MapRoute(
name: "Localisation",
url: "{lang}/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
constraints: new { lang = @"[a-z]{2}|[a-z]{2}-[a-zA-Z]{2}" }
);
// Default routing
routes.MapRoute(
name: "Default",
url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
);
}
This will look at controller requests, before they are handled, and change the current culture based on the URL, a cookie, or the default browser culture.
// Based on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2010/05/06/localization-in-asp.net-mvc-ndash-3-days-investigation-1-day.aspx
public class LocalisationAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
public const string LangParam = "lang";
public const string CookieName = "mydomain.CurrentUICulture";
// List of allowed languages in this app (to speed up check)
private const string Cultures = "en-GB en-US de-DE fr-FR es-ES ro-RO ";
public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
{
// Try getting culture from URL first
var culture = (string)filterContext.RouteData.Values[LangParam];
// If not provided, or the culture does not match the list of known cultures, try cookie or browser setting
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(culture) || !Cultures.Contains(culture))
{
// load the culture info from the cookie
var cookie = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.Cookies[CookieName];
var langHeader = string.Empty;
if (cookie != null)
{
// set the culture by the cookie content
culture = cookie.Value;
}
else
{
// set the culture by the location if not specified - default to English for bots
culture = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.UserLanguages == null ? "en-EN" : filterContext.HttpContext.Request.UserLanguages[0];
}
// set the lang value into route data
filterContext.RouteData.Values[LangParam] = langHeader;
}
// Keep the part up to the "-" as the primary language
var language = culture.Split(new char[] { '-' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)[0];
filterContext.RouteData.Values[LangParam] = language;
// Set the language - ignore specific culture for now
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(language);
// save the locale into cookie (full locale)
HttpCookie _cookie = new HttpCookie(CookieName, culture);
_cookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddYears(1);
filterContext.HttpContext.Response.SetCookie(_cookie);
// Pass on to normal controller processing
base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext);
}
}
e.g.
[Localisation] <<< ADD THIS TO ALL CONTROLLERS (OR A BASE CONTROLLER)
public class AccountController : Controller
{
This is where it got a little tricky and required some workarounds.
Add a ChangeLanguage method to your account controller. This will strip out any existing language code from the "previous path" to allow the new language to take effect.
// Regex to find only the language code part of the URL - language (aa) or locale (aa-AA) syntax
static readonly Regex removeLanguage = new Regex(@"/[a-z]{2}/|/[a-z]{2}-[a-zA-Z]{2}/", RegexOptions.Compiled);
[AllowAnonymous]
public ActionResult ChangeLanguage(string id)
{
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(id))
{
// Decode the return URL and remove any language selector from it
id = Server.UrlDecode(id);
id = removeLanguage.Replace(id, @"/");
return Redirect(id);
}
return Redirect(@"/");
}
The menu options consist of a link with the new language specified as a route parameter.
e.g. (Razor example)
<li>@Html.ActionLink("English", "ChangeLanguage", "Account", new { lang = "en", id = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(Request.RawUrl) }, null)</li>
<li>@Html.ActionLink("Spanish", "ChangeLanguage", "Account", new { lang = "es", id = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(Request.RawUrl) }, null)</li>
The return URl is the current page, encoded so that it can become the id parameter of the URL. This means that you need to enable certain escape sequences that are otherwise refused by Razor as a potential security violation.
Note: for non-razor setups you basically want an anchor that has the new language, and the current page relative URL, in a path like:
http://website.com/{language}/account/changelanguage/{existingURL}
where {language}
is the new culture code and {existingURL}
is a URLencoded version of the current relative page address (so that we will return to the same page, with new language selected).
The required encoding of the return URL means that you will need to enable certain escape characters, in the web.config
, or the existing URL parameter will cause an error.
In your web.config, find the httpRuntime
tag (or add it) in <system.web>
and add the following to it (basically remove the % that is in the standard version of this attribute):
requestPathInvalidCharacters="<,>,&,:,\,?"
In your web.config, find the <system.webserver>
section and add the following inside it:
<security>
<requestFiltering allowDoubleEscaping="true"/>
</security>
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