Is Blazor server culture set via a url?

Question

Hi all;

Reading this section, it looks like the way to set the locale in Blazor for a user is:

 Navigation.NavigateTo(
                    $"Culture/Set?culture={cultureEscaped}&redirectUri={uriEscaped}",
                    forceLoad: true);

Is that correct? That strikes me as a really convoluted solution.

And does setting this then set it for the session/circuit? For both the strings returned from IStringLocalizer and the date/number formatting?

Also, is it correct to assume that the culture for a session/circuit, if I don't navigate to this url, is the one set in the user's browser?

thanks - dave

Answer 1

Hi @David Thielen

As we all known, in the Blazor Server application, the communication or navigation is based on SignalR circuit (WebSockets). So, if localization schemes are based on the URL path or query string, the scheme might not be able to work with WebSockets, thus fail to persist the culture. Therefore, the recommended approach is to use a localization culture cookie, it will ensure that the WebSocket connection can correctly propagate the culture. See the Dynamically set the server-side culture by user preference section of this article to see an example Razor expression that persists the user's culture selection.

So, it will use the follow code to achieve a redirect-based approach with a localization cookie. The app persists the user's selected culture via a redirect to a controller. The controller sets the user's selected culture into a cookie and redirects the user back to the original URI.

 Navigation.NavigateTo(
                    $"Culture/Set?culture={cultureEscaped}&redirectUri={uriEscaped}",
                    forceLoad: true);

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Best regards,

Dillion

Answer 2

That code snippet you posted seems to be navigating to a "Culture/Set" endpoint with culture and redirectUri parameters. It looks like a custom solution for setting the culture in a Blazor application. Typically, setting the culture for a user in a web application involves updating the CultureInfo for the current thread.

If you're dealing with localization and want to set the culture for the session, you might want to look into using System.Globalization.CultureInfo directly. For example:

var cultureInfo = new CultureInfo("es-MX"); // Set your desired culture
CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentCulture = cultureInfo;
CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentUICulture = cultureInfo;

This would affect how date, time, and number formatting is handled in your application.

As for the default behavior without navigating to a custom endpoint, Blazor typically relies on the user's browser settings to determine the initial culture. However, if you want to override that behavior, setting it in the ConfigureServices method in Startup.cs might be more straightforward:

services.Configure<RequestLocalizationOptions>(options =>
{
    options.DefaultRequestCulture = new RequestCulture("es-MX");
});