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We have a rather large application, with a great deal of dynamic content. Is there anyway to force struts to use a database for the i18n lookups, instead of properties files?

I'd be open for other ways to solve this as well, if anyone has ever done i18n with dynamic content.

partkyle
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  • There used to be ways to do this with Struts 1 (eg. http://wiki.apache.org/struts/DatabaseMessageResourcesHowto). There doesn't seem to be much information about how to do the same thing in Struts 2, unfortunately. – Todd Owen Feb 07 '11 at 00:19

4 Answers4

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I don't know of an easy plug-and-play solution for this, so you will probably have to implement it yourself -- plan on spending quite a bit of time just coming to grips with how the localization features of struts 2 (and XWork) are implemented. The key will probably be to provide your own implementation of com.opensymphony.xwork2.TextProvider (and tell struts to use it by providing a <bean> tag in struts.xml). I can think of at least two ways of fitting this into the overall architecture:

  • Have your TextProvider implementation access the database directly. In the spirit of YAGNI, this is probably the best way to start (you can always refactor later, if necessary).

  • Alternatively, you could place the database code into an implementation of Java's ResourceBundle interface, which is what XWork uses internally. To me this sounds like an even more design-heavy approach, but on the plus side there are some articles around describing how to do this.

Community
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Todd Owen
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No, there is no built-in way to have Struts2 load localized content from a database. You would need to write that yourself.

What are your requirements? Do you need for users to be able to dynamically change field prompts, error messages, etc.?

Steven Benitez
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  • Our users input what are essentially surveys, and those need to be translated. I was hoping to change the source of the translation resources, so that we could change the translations dynamically as well. – partkyle Feb 06 '11 at 05:42
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You may be able to do something like that by building a custom interceptor. You could have the interceptor read all the key value pairs from your database and inject them into the value stack. The only thing I am not sure about, not really having messed with i18n with struts before, is if the i18n stuff pulls that information from the value stack. If not, I am not sure if maybe you could do something else in the interceptor to load up the information.

Building a custom interceptor is not too terribly complicated. There are plenty of tutorial sites out there, including (brace for self promotion here) my blog: http://ddubbya.blogspot.com/2011/01/creating-custom-struts2-interceptors.html.

Dustin Wilhelmi
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Use properties files just for static content, like labels, messages etc.

For dynamic content start with a database table that includes a language-code-id for every language you want to use. All the dynamic content entries that are already translated go with their respective language-code-id added to their primary key. If a translation is missing, you can program your application to fall back to your default language in order to make things easier until the right translation is present.

Let your users provide their contributions in the language they like and store it with the appropriate language-id. Someone should provide the translation to the other languages in order to make the contribution complete.

...
PRIMARY KEY  (`subject_id`,`language_id`),
...
Costis Aivalis
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