Globalization and Controls in C#

Over the last couple of years, I have found myself seeing “globalization” being added as a requirement more and more frequently. Microsoft has done an amazing job making it easy to easily implement a display interface that is culture friends. The CultureInfo Class provides an easy to use way of displaying dates, currency, digit grouping and so on.

In an effort to show once again how easy and time saving it is to create your own controls, I created a simple “globalized” phone number formatting (masked) text box.

The idea is to create two dictionaries, one with the phone number formatting with area code and one without. Overriding the OnCreateControl to select the appropriate Mask to apply. I couldn’t find a way to get the phone number formatting from the CultureInfo, it doesn’t look like there’s a way. Basically, I have the dictionary that you can add full codes, language code only or country code only. It will look for the full code first, if there’s no match it will look for the country code and lastly the language code. Finally, if there is no matches on any of the above, it will return the entry with the key “”. It’s the default for when globalization is off as well. The property Globalize is intended to be able to disable the globalization just in case.

As always, you can download the sample here.

Wiki article on the subject is here.

1:  public class PhoneNumberMaskedTextBox : MaskedTextBox
2:     {
3:         /// <summary>
4:         /// Indicates if the culture of the OS should be applied
5:         /// </summary>
6:         private bool globalize = true;
7:         /// <summary>
8:         /// Indicates if the formatting should include the areacode
9:         /// </summary>
10:         private AreaCode areaCode = AreaCode.WithAreaCode;
11:
12:
13:         /// <summary>
14:         /// Gets or Sets if the control should globalize according to the OS Culture
15:         /// </summary>
16:         public bool Globalize { get { return globalize; } set { globalize = value; } }
17:         /// <summary>
18:         /// Gets or Sets if the formatting should include areacode
19:         /// </summary>
20:         public AreaCode AreaCode { get { return areaCode; } set { areaCode = value; } }
21:
22:
23:         private Dictionary<string, string> formatsWithAreaCode = new Dictionary<string, string>()
24:         {
25:             {"US","(000) 000-0000"},
26:             {"es-VE","(0000) 000,00,00"},
27:             {"CN","(00) 00000000"},
28:             {"FR","00 00 00 00 00"},
29:             {"","(000) 000-0000"}
30:         };
31:         private Dictionary<string, string> formatsWithoutAreaCode = new Dictionary<string, string>()
32:         {
33:             {"US","000-0000"},
34:             {"es-VE","000,00,00"},
35:             {"CN","00000000"},
36:             {"FR","00 00 00"},
37:             {"","000-0000"}
38:         };
39:         public PhoneNumberMaskedTextBox() : base()
40:         {
41:             if (globalize)
42:                 Culture = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
43:         }
44:         protected override void OnCreateControl()
45:         {
46:
47:             this.Mask = getMask();
48:             base.OnCreateControl();
49:         }
50:         protected string  getMask()
51:         {
52:             Dictionary<string, string> dictionaryToUse = new Dictionary<string, string>();
53:             if (this.AreaCode == PNCControls.AreaCode.WithAreaCode)
54:                 dictionaryToUse = formatsWithAreaCode;
55:             else if (this.AreaCode == PNCControls.AreaCode.WithoutAreaCode)
56:                 dictionaryToUse = formatsWithoutAreaCode;
57:             if (dictionaryToUse.ContainsKey(Culture.Name))
58:             {
59:                 return dictionaryToUse[Culture.Name];
60:             }
61:             else if (dictionaryToUse.ContainsKey(Culture.Name.Replace(Culture.TwoLetterISOLanguageName + "-","")))
62:                return  dictionaryToUse[Culture.Name.Replace(Culture.TwoLetterISOLanguageName + "-","")];
63:             else if (dictionaryToUse.ContainsKey(Culture.TwoLetterISOLanguageName))
64:             {
65:                 return dictionaryToUse[Culture.TwoLetterISOLanguageName];
66:             }
67:             else return dictionaryToUse[""];
68:         }
69:     }