在MVC3 / razor中的布局页面事件之后返回相同的视图

Question

I have an MVC3 application using the razor view engine and twitter-bootsrap. In my _Layout.cshtml file, I have a dropdown with a list of supported languages and have it's onchange wired to the following code:

 public ActionResult ChangeLanguage(string langue)
 {
     CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo(langue);
     System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = ci;
     System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = ci;
     return View("Index", "_Layout");
 }

It works fine, but currently always return the Index view. I would like to return whatever view was currently displayed when the user changed language. I tried:

• return View(); //obviously doesn't work
• return View("Index", "_Layout"); //current code, not dynamic
• return Redirect(this.Request.UrlReferrer.AbsolutePath); //does nothing, language doesn't change either
• passing the view as a parameter and returning it: I couldn't find an object that actually work
• This question seems to be a possible solution start but I'm not familiar enough yet to adapt it.
• return Redirect(Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_REFERER"]); //good page, no culture change

My question is in 2 parts:

• How can I return the same view that the user was seeing when he changed language?
• Where should I really put this code? It's currently using the same controller as the homepage and that doesn't feel right. Is there an equivalent to an ASP.NET webforms masterpage's codebehind file?

Answer 1

I would pull the view off the request.

Request.Url.AbsoluteUri.

Not sure if you could hijack the routing engine to identify the view, but it shouldn't be too hard.

You could also add a property to a base model you inherit all your models from. Then you could create a hidden field everywhere but this seems like something that would eventually get lost. The only thing you can count on every time forever, would be the URL in the request.

If your controller's and views are complex enough, you may have to cache this in the session. A single string per user shouldn't be that big of a deal. But perhaps there is a better solution to this problem in general.

Answer 2

I would go about this one of two ways.

1. Build up your controller logic to accomadate a few useful things in a base controller and add the Change Language logic in the BaseController.

    public class BaseController : Controller
    {
        public BaseController()
        {
            this.SetCurrentCulture();
        }

        private void SetCurrentCulture()
        {
           If(String.IsNullOrEmpty(MySession.Language))
              MySession.Language="en-US";
           CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo(MySession.Language);
           System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = ci;
           System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = ci;
        }

        public ActionResult ChangeLanguage(string language)
        {
           MySession.Language=language;
           this.SetCurrentCulture();
           return View();//or something 
        }
    }


   public class MyController:BaseController
   {
   }

2. Perform the task client side with a ajax post and reload.

    $.ajax({ type: "POST",
    url: '@Url.Action("ChangeLanguage","SomeController"),
        datatype: "json",
    traditional: true,
    data: {Language:'fr-CA'},
    success: function () {},
    error: function (xhr, status, error) {}
    });

   window.location.href=window.location.href;

Answer 3

You could use the Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_REFERER"] to get the page referring page.

public ActionResult ChangeLanguage(string langue)
{
  CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo(langue);
  System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = ci;
  System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = ci;
  var referer = Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_REFERER"];
  return Redirect(referer);
}

The way I've handled this in the past was to change the culture using an ActionFilterAttribute which I would apply to all controllers.

public sealed class CultureActionFilterAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        object value;
        // get culture
        filterContext.RouteData.TryGetValue("culture", out value);
        var cultureName = value as string;
        if (cultureName == null)
        {
            cultureName = // resolve your default culture
        }

        var culture = new CultureInfo(cultureName);
        Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = culture;
        Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = culture;

    }
}

(I had route constraints verify the culture before this actionfilter took affect. If you don't want to do that... because you're using querystring parametrs... the validation should probably go in this method.)