Multilanguage WebService?

[Pawe³ Piotrowski]

Hi!
What are the best practises when building WebService
supporting multilanguage users?
For example, when WebService checks some business rules
and returns message to the user.
Best regards

Pawel

[John Saunders]

"Pawe³ Piotrowski" <mr******@interia.plwrote in message
news:op***************@n1054.matrixnew.pl...

Hi!
What are the best practises when building WebService
supporting multilanguage users?
For example, when WebService checks some business rules
and returns message to the user.

These are the same rules for any multi-lingual application. There's nothing
special about web services, in this regard.

John

[Paweł Piotrowski]

On Fri, 08 Sep 2006 18:23:41 +0200, John Saunders <john.saunders at
<"trizetto.com>"wrote:

"Pawe³ Piotrowski" <mr******@interia.plwrote in message
news:op***************@n1054.matrixnew.pl...

>Hi!
What are the best practises when building WebService
supporting multilanguage users?
For example, when WebService checks some business rules
and returns message to the user.

These are the same rules for any multi-lingual application. There's
nothing
special about web services, in this regard.

John

Do you mean for example propagate user culture to WebService by method call
and setting thread current culture and use ResourceManager?
Pawel

[Peter Ritchie [C# MVP]]

Internationalization of web services is an emerging field.

The is a draft specification WS-i18n (short for WS-internationalization)
that drafts specifications for passing locale, language, and formatting
information from a client to a web service.

If you're simply looking to return fault text, or response text in specific
languages, I believe the suggested practice is to push locale preferences
into the extensible SOAP headers. Keeping the method interfaces free of
locale information.

If you're using ASP.NET you can then extract that, creating a CultureInfo
object from that locale to pass to
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICul ture. That way, if you
have localized text that you have stored in your resources the resource
manager will automatically handle getting the appropriate text, defaulting to
a neutral culture for that locale or defaulting to an invariant language.

--
Browse http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ and vote.
http://www.peterRitchie.com/blog/
Microsoft MVP, Visual Developer - Visual C#
"Paweł Piotrowski" wrote:

Hi!
What are the best practises when building WebService
supporting multilanguage users?
For example, when WebService checks some business rules
and returns message to the user.
Best regards

Pawel

[John Saunders]

"Peter Ritchie [C# MVP]" <PR****@newsgroups.nospamwrote in message
news:FC**********************************@microsof t.com...

Internationalization of web services is an emerging field.

The is a draft specification WS-i18n (short for WS-internationalization)
that drafts specifications for passing locale, language, and formatting
information from a client to a web service.

If you're simply looking to return fault text, or response text in
specific
languages, I believe the suggested practice is to push locale preferences
into the extensible SOAP headers. Keeping the method interfaces free of
locale information.

If you're using ASP.NET you can then extract that, creating a CultureInfo
object from that locale to pass to
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICul ture. That way, if you
have localized text that you have stored in your resources the resource
manager will automatically handle getting the appropriate text, defaulting
to
a neutral culture for that locale or defaulting to an invariant language.

I haven't read the draft, but I would agree with Peter. I'd like to amplify
a few of his points:

1) One additional reason to use SOAP headers for the culture information is
that this is the way that recent web service enhancements have worked.
2) Be sure to pass something platform-independant between the client and
server. For instance, use the ISO country and culture codes, and stay away
from anything specific to .NET

John

[Peter Ritchie [C# MVP]]

"John Saunders" wrote:

2) Be sure to pass something platform-independant between the client and
server. For instance, use the ISO country and culture codes, and stay away
from anything specific to .NET

Agreed. The current ws-i18n notes describe locale as an ISO code like
en-us. It's also worth noting that locale should not be neutral, it should
always include a culture with the language--something you should always have
as a Windows client anyway. If your web service doesn't support translation
to that specific culture the resource manager will fall back to the neutral
language (i.e. if a client's culture is "fr-ca" and you only support "fr-fr"
and "fr", the resource manager will fall back to "fr" automatically. If you
don't support "fr" at all, but have set up an invariant language, the
resource manager will then fall back to that automatically).

As you pointed out John, this aspect of globalization is the same as a
"normal" .NET application.

[Pablo Cibraro [MVP]]

Hi Peter,

I wrote an small implementation of WS-I18N for WCF. You can find it here,
http://www.codeproject.com/winfx/WSI18N.asp

Thanks
Pablo.

"Peter Ritchie [C# MVP]" <PR****@newsgroups.nospamwrote in message
news:FC**********************************@microsof t.com...

Internationalization of web services is an emerging field.

The is a draft specification WS-i18n (short for WS-internationalization)
that drafts specifications for passing locale, language, and formatting
information from a client to a web service.

If you're simply looking to return fault text, or response text in
specific
languages, I believe the suggested practice is to push locale preferences
into the extensible SOAP headers. Keeping the method interfaces free of
locale information.

If you're using ASP.NET you can then extract that, creating a CultureInfo
object from that locale to pass to
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICul ture. That way, if you
have localized text that you have stored in your resources the resource
manager will automatically handle getting the appropriate text, defaulting
to
a neutral culture for that locale or defaulting to an invariant language.

--
Browse http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ and vote.
http://www.peterRitchie.com/blog/
Microsoft MVP, Visual Developer - Visual C#
"Pawel Piotrowski" wrote:

>Hi!
What are the best practises when building WebService
supporting multilanguage users?
For example, when WebService checks some business rules
and returns message to the user.
Best regards

Pawel