How to use the Request URL/URL Rewriting For Localization in ASP.NET - Using an HTTP Module or Globa
- by LocalizedUrlDMan
I wanted to see if there is a way to use the request URL/URL rewriting to set the language a page is rendered in by examining a portion of the URL in ASP.NET. We have a site that already works with ASP.NET’s resource localization and user’s can change the language that they see pages/resources on the site in, however the current mechanism in not very search engine friendly since the language variations for each language all appear as one page. It would be much better if we could have pages like www.site.com/en-mx/realfolder/realpage.aspx that allow linking to culture specific versions of a page.
I know lots of people have likely done localization through URL structures before and I wanted to know if one of your could share how to do this in the Global.asax file or with an HTTP Module (pointing to links to blog postings would be great too). We have a restriction that the site is based on ASP.NET 2.0 (so we can't used the 3.5+ features yet).
Here is the example scenario:
A real page exits at:
www.site.com/realfolder/realpage.aspx
The page has a mechanism for the user
to change the language it is displayed
in via a dropdown.
There are search engine optimization
and user links sharing benefits to
doing this since people can link
directly to a page that has content
that is applicable to a certain
language (this could also include
right-to-left layouts for languages
like Japanese).
I would like to use an HTTP module to
see if the first part of the URL after
www.site.com, site.com,
subdomain.site.com, etc. contains a
valid culture code (e.g. en-us, es-mx)
then use that value to set the
localization culture of the
page/resources based on that URL.
So if the user accesses the URL
www.site.com/en-MX/realfolder/realpage.aspx
Then the page will render in Mexico’s
variant of Spanish.
If the user goes to
www.site.com/realfolder/realpage.aspx
directly the page would just use their
browser’s language settings.
