ASP.NET Globalization - Date Display
Good morning,
Apologies for the newbie question. I am just getting started with ASP.NET internationalization settings.
Background information:
I have a website that displays an <table>
HTML entity . In this <table>
HTML entity, I have a column that displays dates. My server is located in the USA, these dates are displayed as MM/DD/YYYY
. Many of my users connect to this web page via Excel via the Data -> Import External Data -> Import Web Query interface. Most of my users are in the United States, so these dates are displayed correctly on Excel screens.
Now I need to make a webpage for UK users. As is the case, they load dates as MM/DD/YYYY
, which makes their tables unusable since their locale is set to DD/MM/YYYY
.
My question is:
How do I do this so that the web server understands that the incoming request has a culture setting en-GB
? I could develop my own custom solution, but I'm sure I'm not the first programmer. How does he handle it? I'm looking for a solution that is relatively simple and quick to put up with, but I don't want to just put some shitty piece of my own logic that I will be afraid in 6 months.
Thanks a lot in advance, -Alan.
A few points:
-
The <globalization> element also needs a culture = "auto" attribute. The uiCulture attribute affects the language used to retrieve resources. The culture attribute affects the culture used to format numbers, dates.
-
As noted in this MSDN article , it is not recommended to exclusively use browser settings to define the UI culture for a page. Users often use browsers that are not tuned to their preferences (eg Internet cafes). You must provide a method that allows users to explicitly select the language, language, and culture (CultureInfo name) for the page.
You can let the browser customize the UI culture automatically if you like by opening the web.config file, for example:
<configuration>
<system.web>
<globalization uiCulture="auto" />
...
And then the culture set by the browser will be automatically installed in your application. This means that when you have the display date / time values of the frame, they will be formatted according to the current UI culture.
This will also help if you are using currency and / or localized text (however, you must provide localized resources for each culture you support).
You can also accept a query string parameter to override your culture settings.
The culture initialization should go in the Page.InitializeCulture method.
protected override void InitializeCulture ( )
{
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture
= Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture
= Request.QueryString [ "culture" ] != null ? new CultureInfo ( Request.QueryString [ "culture" ] ) : CultureInfo.InvariantCulture;
//base.InitializeCulture ( );
}
Usage: http://tempuri.org/page.aspx?culture=en-GB