Razor Pages: Set cookie from _Layout.cshtml

Question

In _Layout.cshtml I have menu to change language of the application, like:

 <nav id="nav-lang"> <ul> <li> <a href="?culture=en-EN">EN</a> </li> <li> <a href="?culture=pl-PL">PL</a> </li> </ul> </nav> 

What it does is reloading the page and sets new culture - works well. The thing is, that if the user changes culture and then go to other page within my app, default culture is loaded. I checked my options and the best choice seems to be setting a cookie "UserCulture" to eg "c=pl-PL|uic=pl-PL". The thing is I don't really know how to do it from in razor pages. I think that I should have a with asp-page-handler set to some method (eg "SetCulture") and have setting cookie in that method, but this causes some problems:

• where to put "SetCulture" if the form would be in _Layout.cshtml? _Layout.cshtml doesn't have code behind file
• how to submit the form from anchor ? If I put input type="submit" it ruins the look of the menu completely.. I know I could do it from js but I try to avoid js where it's not absolutely required, especially for such basic stuff..

I might be missing something very basic here, I'm quite new to Razor Pages still. From the hindsight I should have probably sticked to MVC but Razor Pages was said to be easier ..

Answer 1

Thanks, Brad. The solution you proposed works well. In the meantime I've got also other suggestion elsewhere and I'll post it too for anyone searching the answer in future.

In _Layout.cshtml:

<nav id="nav-lang">
    <ul>
        <li><a asp-page="/Index" asp-page-handler="SetCulture" asp-route-culture="en-EN">EN</a></li>
        <li><a asp-page="/Index" asp-page-handler="SetCulture" asp-route-culture="pl-PL">PL</a></li>
    </ul>
</nav>

In code-behind of Index (or any other page having code-behind):

public async Task<IActionResult> OnGetSetCultureAsync(string culture)
        {
            HttpContext.Response.Cookies.Append("Culture", "c=" + culture + "|uic=" + culture);
            var returnUrl = Request.Headers["Referer"].ToString();
            if (returnUrl.Contains("?culture="))
            {
                var url = returnUrl.Substring(0, returnUrl.IndexOf("?culture=")); 
                return Redirect(url + "?culture=" + culture);
            }
            else
            {
                return Redirect(returnUrl + "?culture=" + culture);
            }

        }

And of course, for both solutions to work, there must be info in Startup.cs >> Configure:

var supportedCultures = new[]
            {
                new CultureInfo("en-US"),
                new CultureInfo("pl-PL")
            };

            var lo = new RequestLocalizationOptions // Localization Options
            {
                DefaultRequestCulture = new RequestCulture("en-US"),
                SupportedCultures = supportedCultures,
                SupportedUICultures = supportedCultures
            };

            var cp = lo.RequestCultureProviders.OfType<CookieRequestCultureProvider>().First(); // Culture provider
            cp.CookieName = "Culture";

Answer 2

I haven't tested this out but what about setting the cookie using JavaScript and then reloading the page. The server side razor page code should check the code instead of a query parameter.

Something like the following on the _Layout page. Modify the menu to call a JS function instead of a link with a query parameter. In the JS set the cookie and reload the page.

<nav id="nav-lang">
    <ul>
        <li class="nav-item" onClick="setCulture('en-EN')">EN</li>
        <li class="nav-item" onClick="setCulture('pl-PL')">PL</li>
    </ul>
</nav>
...
<script>
    function setCulture(culture) {
        document.cookie = "culture="+culture;
        location.reload();
    }
</script>