Gender Aware Localization in ASP.NET

• Download source code - 33 KB

Introduction

A while ago, I needed to implement localization depending also on the gender of the registered user, something obviously more relevant to languages other than English (for example, mine - Hebrew). After playing around a bit with writing my own custom ResourceManager/Provider classes, I decided to follow a suggestion I received for a much simpler way - create my own custom cultures for each required language.

Step 1 - Create your own custom culture

For each language required, create a custom "female" culture as a clone of the original culture. For example, the following code creates a custom culture named 'he-IL-f' which is a clone of 'he-IL'. Install the culture on your machine. You can verify the installation was successful by viewing your “C:\Windows\Globalization” folder after running the exe.

CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder cib = 
  new CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder("he-IL-f", CultureAndRegionModifiers.None);
// Populate the new CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder object with culture information.
CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo("he-IL");
cib.LoadDataFromCultureInfo(ci);

// Populate the new CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder object with region information.
RegionInfo ri = new RegionInfo("IL");
cib.LoadDataFromRegionInfo(ri);

cib.Parent = ci;

//CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.Unregister("he-IL-f");
cib.Register();

* The above code needs admin rights to execute, so if in Vista, run the exe “as admin”.

The fallback culture of the new culture will be the original one – this is why we have this line:

cib.Parent = ci;

This enables us to only enter the strings that need changing in the "female" RESX files.

Step 2 - Create the correspondingly names RESX files

Notice that in the “female” RESX files, you only need to insert those strings which differ from their “male” version.

Step 3 - Set the thread's UICulture property

protected override void InitializeCulture()
{
    string culture = "";

    if (Request.Form["DropDownListCulture"] != null)
         {
                 string gender = Request.Form["DropDownListGender"];
        bool isFemale = (gender == "Female");

        culture = Request.Form["DropDownListCulture"];
        dir = (culture == "he-IL") ? "rtl" : "ltr";

        if (isFemale)
        {
            culture += "-f";
        }
    }

    Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(culture);
    Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new CultureInfo(culture);
    base.InitializeCulture();
}

In my example I used the InitializeCulture event of the page to perform the logic. In more complex systems, we’d probably want to move this logic to a more centralized location (perhaps some event in the Application level). I receive two parameters from the form – language and gender. Of course, in a real application, we would have this information per user and use it automatically upon login.

Using the code / Points of interest

1. In the source code supplied, we register three custom cultures: en-US-f, he-IL-f, and fr-FR-f.

You can verify this by checking your “C:\Windows\Globalization” folder after running the exe.

2. Note that the French culture was registered without this line of code: cib.Parent = ci;.

This means that instead of falling back to fr-FR, it falls back to the default culture (en-US, in our case).

This is demonstrated when using the global resource ‘Talya’ (at the bottom of the page): its default in English is ‘talya’, and it is overridden in the he-IL and fr-FR cultures, but not in their female versions.

When viewed with the he-IL-f culture, it falls back to the Hebrew resource ‘טליה’. However, when viewed with the fr-FR-f culture instead of falling back to ‘talya (French)’, it falls back to the English ‘talya’. This is because we didn’t set the French female culture’s parent to the French culture.