Languages natively. The document at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/office/sps2003/maintain/spsinatl.mspx#E5F
Discusses this situation. It is clearly mentioned that
SharePoint
Portal Server 2003 does not support a mixture of different localized
portal servers on the server farm, nor does it support a mixture of
different localized Windows Server 2003 servers. All servers running
Windows Server 2003 in a farm topology must be in the same language,
and all servers running SharePoint Portal Server 2003 in a server farm
must be in the same language
Still, if you want to perform localization in webparts for whatever reasons, it is simple to do so.
We will create a simple MOSS 2007 webpart with localization support.
- Create a simple class library project and reference to the sharepoint namespace.
- Create a template of webpart
- Now we will add a resource file to the project. Choose Add New file from the project menu
And add a resource file for each of the languages. For example
Healthcare.resx
Healthcare.de.resx for German
Healthcare.fr.resx for French
Note that you cannot add App_GlobalResources to the project since it is only valid for the web sites
And not the class library projects.
- Add the following reference to your webpart source file
using System.Configuration;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Resources;
We will pick the language settings from the web.config file. Add the following tag to the
<appsettings> section of the web.config file of your sharepoint web site.
<add key=culture value="de-DE">
Add the following class variables to your webpart source file.
CultureInfo cult = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["culture"]);
ResourceManager rm;
This will create a CultureInfo object based on the language settings in the web.config file.
In the constructor of your webpart add a line like this
rm = new ResourceManager("CustomWebParts.HealthCare", this.GetType().Assembly);
Where HealthCare is the name of your resource file ex HealthCare.resx and HealthCare.de.resx
And CustomWebParts is the namespace of your webpart.
Basically this line creates a resource manager for the specific resource file.
Now we will load all the strings which are used in the webpart source to the resource file.
This is fairly easy.
Now to load strings at any point in the webpart source we will use the GetString() method of
ResourceManager class. For Ex
protected override void CreateChildControls()
{
base.CreateChildControls();
this.Title = rm.GetString("CarePlan", cult);
}
This method sets the title of the webpart to the appropriate language based on the web.config file
The above localization is not specific to sharepoint instead it's an asp.net 2.0 feature.
I can mail the source code of the webpart to anyone if needed.
Send your suggestions and comments.
