Custom cultures question about asp.net resx files - asp.net

We have a custom business culture we've created, let's call it customer.
So we've created a custom culture, en-GB-Customer.
That all works fine if we have a base resource file and then the customer resource file, e.g. Login.aspx.resx and Login.aspx.en-GB-Customer.resx
We see text for general users and then text for Customers depending on the culture.
We have certain aspx pages that are only used by this business culure, e.g. CustomerWelcome.aspx
Ideally we'd like all the customer resources in *.en-GB-Customer.resx
However for some reason, if we only have a CustomerWelcome.aspx.en-GB-Customer.resx file, its not being picked up. The only thing that is displayed is the text in the text='' field on that page. If I rename CustomerWelcome.aspx.en-GB-Customer.resx to CustomerWelcome.aspx.resx then we see the Customer specific stuff.
How do I get this to work?

You always need to provide a fallback resource file, that is, without a culture specified. otherwise it does not work correctly.
So you'll need to keep two files with basically the same content.
CustomerWelcome.aspx.resx (fallback)
CustomerWelcome.aspx.en-GB-Customer.resx

Related

Tagging HTML elements that contain content provided by the ASP resource provider

Currently I am working on an ASP.net webforms project where I would like to indicate to the user which elements on the current page contain localized resources.
In order to identify which HTML elements, contain which localized resources. I'd like to tag all rendered HTML elements that had a resource retrieved from the ResourceProvider while rendering the page. Thereby creating a mapping between HTML element and the used resource(s).
The tagging will be done by adding a data-localized attribute to the html element. The attribute will contain the resource identifier(s) used (i.e. resx file names and the resource keys), and then when the in the browser displays the page a javascript will use this information to do whatever.
So far I have replaced the default resource-provider with my own provider that retrieves resources from a database instead of the regular .resx files (as described in this article). This gives me information about all the resources used and by logging these in the HttpContext, i know all the resources used for the current page.
Now for the mapping, because the localized resource doesn't always have to occur within an HTML element (e.g. it could be just a string yielded by a Literal control). I have introduced a new CompositeControl that wraps a section containing localized resources with a <div data-localized=""> </div>.
My question: How can i map the wrapper with the resources used by its children?
Since you are going to post-process the data with JavaScript, you may think of adding what you need in form of prefix and delimiter to actual translated text, for example "Sample text" will become "##strings.resx##login.form.sample.text##Sample text".
Your client side script would then look for ## delimiters and remove them (or do whatever you want) from the page.
I know it is not what you asked for but I believe it is simpler and easier to implement.

Google Fonts CSS Include

Hey,
Since Google Fonts came out, I have had this question in mind. First see this below:
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Cantarell&subset=latin' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
Here Google is linking to an external CSS file that doesn't have a file extension (.css)! Then Google also has another feature that if you want to inlude another font to this then just add the "|" sign and type the font name. How do you do this? Using Javascript, PHP or something?
Help is appreciated!
Thanks :)
The extension of a file does not have to mean anything at all about the contents of said file. It is merely a convention (one that Windows, for instance, uses to the point of making it seem like a requirement).
Any dynamic 'file' on a web site can return what ever kind of content it wants, any time it wants. The extension means nothing - aside from expected convention.
That URL could be a directory named css with a default 'document' that is a script, which handles the parameters to decide what content to give. Or, it could be a literal file named css which does the same thing. Or, it could not be a file or folder at all, instead merely part of a routing mechanism, which calls a controller based on the URL, and passes the parameters in.
Web servers return information in the response indicating what the MIME Type of the return value is, and the browser determines what to do with it based on that - not based on the extension of the file.
Yes, they have to be doing some sort of server-side processing when this URL is requested
http://fonts.googleapis.com/css
The querystring is parsed, and a text stream is returned with the CSS output. Allowing the user to add additional font families to the CSS is pretty trivial, as the server is just spitting back what you append to the query string.
You could do this in PHP or ASP.Net (and many others), but there is no indication of the underlying technology from Google's URL.
The easiest way to do this yourself would be to create a folder on your web server called "css", and then have a default script in there that does the processing. The URL could basically be almost identical to the Google url.

How to create custom CSS "on the fly" based on account settings in a Django site?

So I'm writing a Django based website that allows users select a color scheme through an administration interface.
I already have middleware/context processors that links the current request (based on domain) to the account.
My question is how to dynamically serve the CSS with the account's custom color scheme.
I see two options:
Add a CSS block to the base template that overrides the styles w/variables passed in through a context processors.
Use a custom URL (e.g. "/static/dynamic/css/< website_id >/styles.css") that gets routed to a view that grabs all the necessary values and creates the css file.
I'm content with either option, but was wondering if anyone else out there has dealt with similar problems and could give some insight as to "Best Practices".
Update : I'm leaning towards option number 2, as I think this will allow for better caching down the road. So it's dynamic the first time, gets stored in memcache (or whatever), and invalidated when a user updates their settings in the admin site.
Update: Firstly, I'd like to thank everyone for their suggestions thus far. All the answers thus far have focused around generating static files. Though this would work great in production, it feels like a tremendous burden during development. If I wanted to add a new element to be styled, or tweak existing styles I'd have to go through and recreate each and every css file. Sure, this could be done with a management command, but I just don't feel it's worth it. Doing it dynamically would add 1 maybe 2 queries to each page load, which is something I'm not worried about at this stage. All I need to know is that at some point I will be able to cache it without rewriting the whole thing.
I've used option #2 with success. There are 2 decent ways of updating the generated static files that I know of:
Use a version querystring like /special_path.css?v=11452354234 where the v parameter is generated from a database field, key in memcached, or some other persistent file. Version gets updated by admin, or for development you would just make the generation not save if the parameter was something special like v=-1. You'll need a process to clean up the old generations after some time.
Don't use a version querystring, but have it look first for the generated file, if it can't find it, it generates it. You can create a cron job or WSGI app that looks for filesystem changes for development, and have a hook from your admin panel that deletes generations after an update. Here's an example of the monitoring, which you would have to convert to be specific to your generations and not to Django. http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/wiki/ReloadingSourceCode#Monitoring%5FFor%5FCode%5FChanges
Could generate the css and store it in a textfield in the same model as the user profile/settings. Could then have a view to recreate them if you change a style. Then do your option 1 above.
Nice question.
I would suggest to pre-generate css file after colors scheme is saved. This would have positive impact on caching and overall page loading time. You can store your css files in directory /media/css/custom/<id or stometing>/styles.css or /media/css/custom/<id or sth>.css and in template add <link rel="stylesheet" href="/media/css/custom/{{some_var_pointing _to_file_name}}" />
You can also do the trick with some random number or date in css file name that could be changed each time file is saved. Thanks to this browser will load the file immediately in case of changes.
UPDATE: example of using model to improve this example
To make managing of those file easy you can create simple model (one per user):
class UserCSS(models.Model):
bg_color = models.CharField(..)
...
...
Fields (like bg_color) can represent parts of your css file. You can ovveride save method to add logic that creates css file for user (by rendering some template).
In case your file format change you can make changes in your's model definition (with some default values for new fields), make little changes in template and run save method for each exisintg instance of class. This would renew your css files.
That should work nicely.
I would create an md5 key with the theme elements, store this key in the user profile and create a ccs file named after this md5 key : you gain static file access and automatic theme change detection.

Multi-lingual static content in ASP.NET

Is there a simple way of making the static content of an .aspx page multi-lingual? Resource files are nice for controls but it's quite hard and annoying to write big chunks of html in them. Any easier ways?
Make properties in resources files and use them, .NET automatically finds the correct resource file, also just make sure so that the property name is same in all the resource files, so it will replace the property value in .aspx page with the value in the resource file.
Don't code html markup in resource file, have the html markup in the .aspx page itself, just get the essential values from resource files.
Just to reiterate what Mahesh said: do NOT put markup in the resource files, just put the static content into them.
If you need to serve different views based on culture, consider doing something else. For example, if you're using MVC you could write a view engine that return the correct markup for each culture.
#ciscoheat what you say is correct, LOCALIZE control is the right thing to use for big chunk of data.

How do I use Google Analytics with Sitecore 6?

I know that I need to add the tracking code snippet at the bottom of all my pages, but is there a central location to do this?
Or do I need to add this tracking code to all of my templates?
I guess that I could wrap the snippet in a user control, or external .js file, and reference it on each page, but is there a global footer somewhere? The site I'm working on has about 30-40 layouts, and adding it to each one would be a pain!
Thanks in advance!
Actually, the role of a Sitecore layout is exactly this; to act as a global file that all individual page templates "derive" from.
Normally you'd stick the analytics code into the master layout, and use Sitecore sublayout/placeholder techniques to construct the various page templates you need. You would not normally need more than perhaps one or two layouts for any device you are serving content to. And I guess for most sites, the only device in use is regular web content delivery.
That being said, what you could do, is have all the layouts inherit their codebase from a common base class (inheriting from Page), and inject the google code centrally from here. Would still require you to go through all layout files however.
I have not tried the module, I think that is codebehind version. I have made this in XSLT, its pretty fast and easy to make. I have footer.xslt where I put the code that simply checks if page you are standing on uses template that I want to index and does not belong to page names that I want to exclude. Then I have an item with a custom template for Google Analytics with following memo fields.
IncludeTemplates -field contains list of templates that I want to include for analytics :
ExcludeItemsNames -field for excluding pages by item name
contains($includeTemplates, concat('|',./#template,'|')) and not(contains($excludeItemNames, concat('|',./#template,'|')))
Remember #key and #template is always in small letters
If you run many domains don't forget to add pageTracker._setDomainName("www.example.com"); in analytics script so you can separate sub-domains etc. if they use same footer.xslt
Normally we consider the actual Google code as content. Within Sitecore we normally have a settings folder, something like /sitecore/content/settings. This exists outside the root of the site. Beneath this have a settings item with a plain multi-line text field, I think the field type is memo or something similar.
Afterwards create an XSLT that renders out the content of this settings item. Something like (assuming the field is called value in the setting item):
<xsl:value-of select="sc:fld('Value','/sitecore/content/settings/footerJavaScript')" />
You may or may not need to set the disable-output-escaping attribute.
Then on the aspx page that your pages use as the template add a control that looks at the xslt rendering:
<sc:XslFile runat="server" Path="/xsl/footerJavaScript" />
The reason that we normally keep the javascript as content is this allows the client to change the analytics code without having to contact us.

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