How to localize a Flex application easily

// August 27th, 2009 // Flex framework

The LocalizableApplication is a tiny class I’ve written to facilitate the task of localizing a Flex application. A demo is shown below

Exploiting the LocalizableApplication class, writing a localizable application is as easy as shown below:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<wg:LocalizableApplication 
  xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
  xmlns:wg="com.webgriffe.core.*" 
  layout="vertical">
 
  <mx:Metadata>
    [ResourceBundle("resource")]
  </mx:Metadata>
 
  <mx:Script>
  <![CDATA[
    [Bindable]
    private var _locales:Array = ["en_US", "it_IT"];
 
    private function changeLocale():void
    {
      var newLocale:String = myCombo.selectedItem as String;
      setLocale(newLocale);
    }
  ]]>
  </mx:Script>
 
  <mx:Label text="{__s('MY_TITLE')}" />
  <mx:ComboBox id="myCombo" 
    dataProvider="{_locales}" 
    change="changeLocale()" />
  <mx:Label text="{__s('MY_TEXT')}" />
 
</wg:LocalizableApplication>

The LocalizableApplication provides some helper functions which let you use something like __s('MY_TITLE') instead of resourceManager.getString("resource", "MY_TITLE"). Faster and easier, isn’t it?

Click here to download full source code.

Enjoy!

References

3 Responses to “How to localize a Flex application easily”

  1. Norbert Kopcsek says:
    August 27, 2009 at 7:35 am

    Hi Alessandro,
    I’m always interested in simplifying localization. Anyway, doesn’t your approach only help on the application level? If you want to create a component using the same technique, you would have to add (copy) those methods to the components super class, which is not so nice …

    What do you think?

  2. Alessandro Ronchi says:
    August 27, 2009 at 8:18 am

    Hi Norbert,

    consider that a Flex Application acts as a Singleton, so those methods are always available within a Flex app, you don’t necessarily have to copy them.

    Obviously this way your components won’t be loosely coupled, this is a nasty compromise expecially if you have to distribute your components.

    Thank you for your comment, it gives me motivation to think to a different approach.

    Best wishes, Alessandro

  3. Rich Rodecker says:
    August 27, 2009 at 9:00 am

    I did something similar, except that I just monkey patched ResourceManager to accept either a string or it’s full parameter set, If just a string was passed to the getString() method, it would pull the localized value from a default “strings” bundle for the app. If more than one argument was passed to the method, it would work normally.

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