In Spring, the ResourceBundleMessageSource is the most common class to resolve text messages for different locales.

Example

Here’s an ResourceBundleMessageSource example to show the use of ResourceBundleMessageSource to retrieve the different locale messages from properties files.

1. Create properties file

Create two properties files, one for English characters (messages_en_US.properties), one for Chinese characters (messages_zh_CN.properties). Put it into the project class path. The parameter value is define with a “{index}” pattern.

messages_en_US.properties

customer.name=Yong Mook Kim, age : {0}, URL : {1}

messages_zh_CN.properties

customer.name=\ufeff\u6768\u6728\u91d1, age : {0}, URL : {1}

The ‘\ufeff\u6768\u6728\u91d1′ is Unicode characters in Chinese.

To display the Chinese characters correctly, you have to use “native2ascii” tool to convert the Chinese characters to Unicode characters.

2. Include the properties file

Include the properties file into the bean configuration file. Both “messages_en_US.properties” and “messages_zh_CN.properties” are consider one file in Spring, you just need to include the file name once, and Spring will find the correct locale automatically.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
	xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans 
	http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd">
 
  <bean id="messageSource"
	class="org.springframework.context.support.ResourceBundleMessageSource">
	<property name="basename">
		<value>locale\customer\messages</value>
	</property>
  </bean>
 
</beans>

P.S Assume both files are located at “resources\locale\customer\” folder.

3. Run it

package com.mkyong.common;
 
import java.util.Locale;
 
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;
 
public class App 
{
    public static void main( String[] args )
    {
    	ApplicationContext context = 
    		new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(new String[] {"locale.xml"});
 
    	String name = context.getMessage("customer.name", 
    		new Object[] { 28, "http://www.mkyong.com" }, Locale.US);
 
    	System.out.println("Customer name (English) : " + name);
 
    	String namechinese = context.getMessage("customer.name", 
    	        new Object[] { 28, "http://www.mkyong.com" }, 
                Locale.SIMPLIFIED_CHINESE);
 
    	System.out.println("Customer name (Chinese) : " + namechinese);
 
    }
}

output

P.S Make sure your Eclipse is able to display the Chinese output.

1. In context.getMessage(), the second argument is the message parameters, you have to pass it as object array. You can just pass a null if no parameter values available.

 context.getMessage("customer.name",null, Locale.US);

2. The Locale.US will retrieve the messages from ‘messages_en_US.properties‘, while Locale.SIMPLIFIED_CHINESE will retrieve the messages from ‘messages_zh_CN.properties‘.

3. Read this article to know how to access the MessageSource inside a bean.

Download it – Spring-MessageSource-Example.zip
This article was posted in Spring category.

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