[Springframework-developer] Explicit locales

[Trevor C. <tc...@in...>]

I have a business requirement of handling multiple locales.  Specifically, I
live in Canada, and the application must be available in French and English.
However, due to multiple users on a single computer, we cannot rely solely
on the users locale settings.  What we need to do is default to the users
locale, but provide them with the ability to override these settings
(probably by clicking an "English/French" link).

Anyway, the framework question I have is "is there anyway to do this
currently"?  Looking at the controller servlet, it returns a view based on
"request.getLocale()".  This can't be changed, so I can't see any way to
customize/change it.  My ideas are:

1. Have an explicit object in the request attribute for the locale with a
"hook" to define how the default is determined (request locale, cookie,
session, etc.).  The view (or any other locale "lookup") would be based on
this attribute.

2. Wrap the request/response objects in the control servlet, and provide
hooks for these wrappers (which could override the getLocale() method).

3. Have the view return a generic view, and have the view contain
code/taglibs which do the locale stuff in it.

4. Any other ideas?

My "rating" of my own arguments is that 1 is the best since it abstracts the
locale to the start of the servlet request as an initial parameter (which is
how I consider it).  2 requires a lot of customization to support what
appears to be something others might use (however, the ability to override
other methods might be desirable).  3 is ugly code, and removes all the
benefits of Rod's framework for seamlessly handling the locale issues.

We probably can't make any of these changes for the 1.0 release (if we can
great, but I'm trying to be realistic) but I was looking for some ideas and
counter-arguments.  I need to go ahead with this project (I'm actually
waiting on this issue right now, but I think I've bought myself till Monday
:) ) so I'll probably need to make my own modifications to a local copy of
the code, but if my direction makes sense to everyone, I can probably
polish/generalize my changes and roll it into the main stream in a future
release.

Trevor D. Cook


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