Culture Encoding

The culture encoding attributes in your Web.config file determine many aspects of your .NET application, including currency, date, and number format.  Your application uses these settings at run-time to determine proper operation.  Since these culture encoding attributes are used by the .NET Framework, Iron Speed Designer does not use them directly when generating your application.  However, a discussion of them is included here due to their importance in localizing your application.

The culture encoding attributes are in the configuration section of Web.config, for example:

<configuration>

     <system.web>

          <globalization

              fileEncoding="utf-8"

              requestEncoding="utf-8"

              responseEncoding="utf-8"

          />

     </system.web>

</configuration>

To assist you in localizing your application for multiple cultures, you can instruct Iron Speed Designer to build your application for a particular culture via the Application Information screen of the Application Wizard in Iron Speed Designer.

The following localization and culture encoding attribute information is from Microsoft’s “Setting the Culture and UI Culture for Web Forms Globalization.”

Attribute

Description

Culture
uiCulture

By specifying a culture it is possible to use a set of common preferences for information like strings and date and number formats that correspond to users' cultural conventions.  A Web Forms page has two culture values, Culture and UICulture.  The Culture value determines or influences results of culture-dependent functions, such as displaying the date.  The UICulture value determines how the resources are loaded for the form and is used for culture-specific lookup of resource data.  The only purpose of the UICulture value is to indicate the language the resources should load, that is, determine which language the UI strings should use.  The Culture value determines everything else — date formatting, number formatting, and so on.

The two culture settings do not need to have the same value.  Depending on your application, it may be important to set them separately.  An example is a Web auction site.  The UI culture changes for each Web browser, but the culture stays constant, so prices are always displayed in the same currency and formatting.

The Culture value can only be set to specific cultures such as en-US or en-GB.  This prevents the problem of identifying the correct currency symbol to use for "en", where en-US and en-GB have different currency symbols.

fileEncoding

Specifies the default encoding for .aspx, .asmx, and .asax file parsing.  Unicode and UTF-8 files saved with the byte order mark prefix will be automatically recognized regardless of the value of fileEncoding.

requestEncoding

Specifies the assumed encoding of each incoming request, including posted data and the query string.  If the request comes with a request header containing an Accept-Charset attribute, it overrides the requestEncoding in configuration.  The default encoding is UTF-8, specified in the <globalization> tag included in the Machine.config file created when the .NET Framework is installed.  If request encoding is not specified in a Machine.config or Web.config file, encoding defaults to the computer's Regional Options locale setting.  In single-server applications, requestEncoding and responseEncoding should be the same.  For the less common case (multiple-server applications where the default server encodings are different), you can vary the request and response encoding using local Web.config files.

responseEncoding

Specifies the content encoding of responses.  The default encoding is UTF-8, specified in the <globalization> tag included in the Machine.config file created when the .NET Framework is installed.  If response encoding is not specified in a Machine.config or Web.config file, encoding defaults to the computer's Regional Options locale setting.  In single-server applications, requestEncoding and responseEncoding should be the same.  For the less common case (multiple-server applications where the default server encodings are different), you can vary the request and response encoding using local Web.config files.

For more detail, see:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vbcon/html/vbtskeditingwebconfigfileforwebformsglobalization.asp

An example Show Order Table page with set to display certain dates and currencies in localized formats.

Here are the localization settings for the Show Order Table page shown above.  The Web.config globalization entry is set to “fr-FR” which, in turn, causes the Euro currency symbol to be used since the Euro is the official currency in France.  Similarly, the DD/MM/YYYY European date format is used.

<!--  GLOBALIZATION

     This section sets the globalization settings of the application.

-->

     <globalization

          fileEncoding="utf-8"

          requestEncoding="utf-8"

          responseEncoding="utf-8"

          culture="fr-FR"
          uiCulture="fr-FR"

     />

See Also

Localizing (Internationalizing) Your Application