Multilanguages asp.net mvc site and routing

Question

I develop multilanguages asp.net mvc site. The language stores in url. The default one will be English. I have BaseController class

protected override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
        {
            string culture = filterContext.RouteData.Values[MvcApplication.CultureParamerName] as string;
            if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(culture))
                culture = Facade.Common.GetLocale(BECulture.Cultures.English);//==en-us
            Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo(culture);
            Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new CultureInfo(culture);
            base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext);
        }

and some routes

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
    {
        routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

        routes.MapRoute(
            "Photos_Route",
            "{culture}/photos/{action}/{id}",
            new { controller = "photos", action = "show", culture = "en-us" }
            );
        routes.MapRoute(
            "PhotosDownload_Route",
            "{culture}/photos/{action}/{id}/resolution/{measure1}x{measure2}",
            new { controller = "photos", action = "download", culture = "en-us" }
            );

        routes.MapRoute(
            "Pages_Router",
            "{culture}/page/{id}",
            new { controller = "home", action = "page", id = UrlParameter.Optional, culture = "en-us" }
            );

        routes.MapRoute(
            "Tags_Route", // Route name
            "{culture}/tag/{tag}", // URL with parameters
            new { controller = "photos", action = "ShowPhotosByTag", culture = "en-us" } // Parameter defaults
            );



routes.MapRoute(
            "Home_Route",
            "{culture}/{action}",
            new { controller = "home", culture = "en-us" }
            );

        routes.MapRoute(
            "Default_Route",
            "{culture}/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
            new { controller = "home", action = "index", id = 1, culture = "en-us" }
            );

    }

I want to do following: if the current language is English then the url must not contain "en-us" value, because the English is default language. And vise-versa: if there's no parameter "culture" in url (that is in RouteData.Values["culture"] ) then the default language is English.

How can I do it?

UPDATE: the clarification about what I want. The master page (_Layout.cshtml) contains the link to the page "About site"

 @Html.ActionLink(Resources.Strings.About_LinkText, "about", "home")

If the site in English it points to /en-us/about. But I want (if the site in English) it should point to /about (without en-us).

You're basically making culture required in every request so it will have to be included in every request. By default the first parameter will always be culture. So if it's /home then "home" becomes the culture. This isn't the easiest thing to do. Are the routes set or can you change them? — Buildstarted
– Buildstarted, Commented Oct 19, 2011 at 19:54
You'll probably want to move the culture to the last item and make it {*culture} however it's still not easy. You might need to create a route constraint and duplicate all your routes without the culture parameter — Buildstarted
– Buildstarted, Commented Oct 19, 2011 at 20:42

Darin Dimitrov · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-19 20:03:25Z

1

The problem with this route setup is to decide whether the first token of the route is a valid culture name. For example you will have to deal with routes like:

/fr-FR/home/index
/home/index

In the first case culture="fr-FR" and in the second culture="home". So to deal with this you could try something along the lines of:

protected override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
{
    string culture = filterContext.RouteData.Values["culture"] as string;
    var ci = CultureInfo
        .GetCultures(CultureTypes.AllCultures)
        .FirstOrDefault(x => x.Name == culture);
    if (ci == null)
    {
        // we couldn't find a suitable culture => fallback to default
        ci = new CultureInfo("en-US");
    }

    Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = ci;
    Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = ci;
    base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext);
}

answered Oct 19, 2011 at 20:03

Darin Dimitrov

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7 Comments

Darin Dimitrov Over a year ago

@AlexMaslakov, what's your issue?

Alexandre Over a year ago

<<if the current language is English then the url must not contain "en-us" value, because the English is default language. And vise-versa: if there's no parameter "culture" in url (that is in RouteData.Values["culture"] ) then the default language sets to English.>> In the other words: how to remove extra values "en-us" from url if the default culture is English?

Darin Dimitrov Over a year ago

@AlexMaslakov, your routes are fine and should work for your requirements along with my suggestion about the OnActionExecuting method. Did you try it?

Alexandre Over a year ago

I want to remove "en-us" from url. For example, /home/index and /en-us/home/index displays the same content in English.

Darin Dimitrov Over a year ago

@AlexMaslakov, that's exactly what will happen with this setup (your routes and my OnActionExecuting). I repeat my question once again: did you try it? Did you encounter some problems? If you had you would have seen that both /home/index and /en-us/home/index will display the index action on the home controller with culture=en-us.

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