Localization and MVC

An oft-written about subject, with several solutions. In our specific case we wanted a solution where the language part of the localization was gathered from the url, like ~/no/.

To do this we subclassed MvcRouteHandler like this:

public class LanguageRouteHandler : MvcRouteHandler
{
    protected override IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext)
    {
        string language = requestContext.RouteData.Values["language"] as string;

        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(language))
        {
            CultureInfo info = new CultureInfo(language);

            Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = info;
            Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(info.Name);
        }

        return base.GetHttpHandler(requestContext);
    }
}

When a route using this handler is triggered, it sets the CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture for us, so that all calls to ResourceProviders will get correctly localized values.

To use this you must also modify how your routes are mapped.

Route defaultRoute = new Route(
     "{language}/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
     new RouteValueDictionary(
         new
         {
             language = "no",
             controller = "Home",
             action = "Index"
         }),
     new LanguageRouteHandler());
routes.Add("defaultRoute", defaultRoute);

You might also notice that we use ‘named’ routes as suggested by Chad Moran in http://www.chadmoran.com/blog/2009/4/21/optimizing-url-generation-in-aspnet-mvc-part-1.html.