i18n of bean properties/data

[Colin Kilburn <co...@accesstec.ca>]

Hi All,

I'm not sure if this has been done before as I can't see any reference 
in the archives, but I have a hard time believing I'm the only one.

I have to support multiple languages in my app.  I can successfully set 
my users' locales using the Action.setLocale() method as well as the 
jstl equivalent of Config.setAttribute(...).   I have an 
ApplicationResources file for each language I need to support (English 
and French), and this covers all my form captions and success/error 
messages.  This was slick and easy.  Great.

Now, most of my forms (and I know I'm not alone here) have select lists 
to choose an item such as country, favorite color, or whatever.   These 
fields usually correspond to foreign keys in my database, so I load the 
appropriate lists from the database.   Often this data must be bilingual 
too, so in these select boxes, I need to display a different column's 
data in the list depending on the user's locale.

For example:

Say I have a bean called Color with three properties:  id, name, nameFr 
-- corresponding to the default (English) and French versions of the 
select option.   Depending on the locale, I want to display the 
appropriate property (labelProperty) in the options list.    What I'd 
like to be able to do is say:

<html:options collection="colorList" property="id" labelProperty="name"/>

and have the tag know that based on the locale, if it were french, that 
it should use nameFr as the labelProperty (if such a property exists).


I can imagine how I could implement a subclass of the <html:options/> 
tag to do this (with a big help from BeanUtils), but I'm wondering if 
anyone else has tackled this type of thing before.   I can also forsee 
needing an equivalent alternative to a <c:out/> or perhaps 
<bean:write/>, that knows to append the locale to the property name of 
the bean specified.

I hope this makes sense.   I'm ready to roll my own here, but I wanted 
to see if anyone else has been here before.   Any comments/ideas 
appreciated.

Colin

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Re: i18n of bean properties/data

[Hubert Rabago <hr...@gmail.com>]

If it were up to me, I'd use a collection of LabelValueBean objects
with the label containing the values I want to show accd to the user's
Locale.  I think it would be much easier than writing a custom tag.


On Wed, 20 Oct 2004 18:14:50 -0300, Colin Kilburn <co...@accesstec.ca> wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Say I have a bean called Color with three properties:  id, name, nameFr
> -- corresponding to the default (English) and French versions of the
> select option.   Depending on the locale, I want to display the
> appropriate property (labelProperty) in the options list.    What I'd
> like to be able to do is say:
> 
> <html:options collection="colorList" property="id" labelProperty="name"/>
> 
> and have the tag know that based on the locale, if it were french, that
> it should use nameFr as the labelProperty (if such a property exists).
> 
> I can imagine how I could implement a subclass of the <html:options/>
> tag to do this (with a big help from BeanUtils), but I'm wondering if
> anyone else has tackled this type of thing before.   I can also forsee
> needing an equivalent alternative to a <c:out/> or perhaps
> <bean:write/>, that knows to append the locale to the property name of
> the bean specified.
> 
> I hope this makes sense.   I'm ready to roll my own here, but I wanted
> to see if anyone else has been here before.   Any comments/ideas
> appreciated.
> 
> Colin
>

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