Spring 3 MVC: Internationalization & Localization Tutorial with Example

mateusz f says:

I have a queston. You defined two languages, and de. What if a visitor comes who is from let’s say Canada. Which locale will be chosen for him as default? Is there a way to specify a default locale at all?

Jim says:

Thank you for your blog, much appreciated.

Jim says:

Thanks very much for the sample.

Only question so far is that when I run mvn tomcat:redeploy it looks for mvc-basic-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.war rather than mvc-basic.war that the install actually builds

Gerlad says:

Please SWF tutorial! Great Job

Ajit says:

gr8 job done
Can you show security cache in spring 3

Luponiano says:

Hi Viral, nice tutorial.
I am experiencing problems. I have followed your example and used two languajes, spanish and english. If I set the defaultLocale to ‘en’ all the page is visible on english no matter the spanish accept of the navigator. It is as if it setted how the page should be viewed as default unless the user specifies something different. Do you know if it can be used so the page is viewed in spanish if the navigator is set to spanish and to english otherwise?
Setting the defaultLocale solved the problem of other navigators with another languaje setted.

Thank

Luponiano says:

Hi Viral, I finally managed to solve the problem by extending the SessionLocaleResolver, overriding the determineDefaultLocale and injecting the supported languajes to the new resolver. It may sound a little complicated but it was not too much and now works like a charm.

Thank you for the basis.

saravanan says:

it is very nice website for spring, it is very useful to me.

Bharath says:

Thanks for your tutorial…. its really helpful…..

Kiran Hegde says:

Hi Viral, good work man…
Latest tech stuff…

Alex says:

Great tutorial, finally I’m making some stuff with spring, thanks man.

damiencharp says:

Thanks ! Keep up the good work.

amila says:

place can u give another tutorial in netbeans

amila says:

if u can give me same ref:
thank u

Gal Levisnky says:

Hi,
Very nice introduction, however it is possible to make it even with less config:
remove the handlerMapping from the xml, and replace the LocaleChangeInterceptor with the following:

than in the header user ?locale=de instead of ?lang=de.

Thanks.

sai says:

hi Luponiano

can u post ur session local resolver example?

thanks much

Hriday says:

Hi,
Thanks very much … it was really helpful. But I stuck in problem. In case I already have a parameter in my url in tht case ?lang=en breaks
eg. I hv a url
http://hostname/path/index.html?id=1
Now if click on lang English, it will append the ?lang=en to it which is creating problem. Can you suggest some solution to this.

Thanks Again
Hriday

VK says:

Nice work man.. really appreciate this… helped me to quickly learn the basics of spring.

Falkster says:

Great stuff. Thanks a lot!

PS:

There are two little mistakes in the German translations. It’s „Kontakt-Manager“ not „Kontakt Manager“, the hyphen is obligatory on compounds (you could also translate it fully into german and write it as one word: „Kontaktverwaltung“). And you can’t say/write „Addieren Kontakt“. „Kontakt addieren“ would be O.K., but „addieren“ is commonly related to a mathematical context, so „Kontakt hinzufügen“ would be much better.

Hitesh Joshi says:

Nice Tutorial Viral. Have a question though related to the following:
“”

In the above, the messages.properties and related files need to be present in the classpath of the application. Can I give a relative path with respect to the classpath? Basically, my problem is that I have all my messages.properties related files in the JBoss Server config location and not in the created WAR file. So, how should I configure the messageSource Bean.

Thanks!

Diman says:

Hi Viral,
thanks a lot for example. Localisation in the context of your tutorials means, user has to tell us where he comes from(or what language he/she speaks), right? Is there any way in spring, to check where he comes from… also to be able to give user a suggestion of his language. Example, if user accessing my webpage from chinese (or russian) server… Maybe I can already display contact form in chinese (or in russian).

Thanks and Best Regards,
Diman

suma says:

Hi,

I have implemented localization the same way you have described.
I am getting an exception
ERROR 2011-02-25 12:27:01,448 [http-8080-1] org.springframework.web.servlet.tags
.MessageTag: No message found under code ‘title.xxx’ for locale ‘en_US’.
javax.servlet.jsp.JspTagException: No message found under code ‘title.xxx
for locale ‘en_US’.

Any ideas

ricky says:

Hi Suma, I had the same issue. Just make sure you create the ‘resources’ folder as a ‘Source Folder’ as Viral indicated. If you create the ‘resources’ folder as a ‘Folder’ the 2 messages property files does not get copy to your war file.

Sandeep Tyagi says:

Very nice, and precisely build example. keep it up guys.

Borpf says:

hmm.. ok this tutorial can be used for internationalisation, but it just describes a way to replace some text by submitting a request parameter. Real locale switching would matter in different outputs e.g. on DateFormats like en=01/31/1970 de=31.01.1970 or currency outputs.. How about extending this example to show, that switching locale by using LocaleChangeInterceptor and LocaleResolver would also effect these points?

Goutham says:

Hi , nice tutorial,However i have a prob here. Clicking on the en|de i am not getting tge diff locale..
I have added the following in my own xml:

And my messages.properties are in place for both the languages.
And my header has the following :
en |
de |

Goutham says:

My ?lang=de as well as ?lang=en is displaying the same text even though text in both the properties is different. I am not able to change my local. I ve added this my XML :

Sara says:

In case you’re using Spring 3.0.5, please be aware of the conflict between and DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping (http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?81238-Conflict-between-lt-mvc-annotation-driven-gt-and-DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping).
I.e.instead of defining the interceptor by creating, as in the example, the bean localeChangeInterceptor and then putting it in bean handlerMapping, you would just need to define it inside the tag, like this:

Bolat says:

Dear Viral,

Unfortunately, the necessary amended spring-servlet.xml definition for Spring 3.0.5 by Sara (last comment) did not come out (as it appears that xml tags are automatically omitted when posting). Would you happen to know how to define it inside the tag as there is a conflict when using the standard spring-servlet.xml file for Spring 3.0.5, which includes the xmlns:mvc=”http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc tag in the header, which thereby enforces the declaration of the mvc:annotation-driven tag.

Many thanks.

Kind regards,
Bolat

Bolat says:

Dear Viral,

Just to be clear regarding my post a few minutes ago, if I remove the xmlns:mvc=”http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc tag in the header and also the mvc:annotation-driven tag, the language switching from English to German works very well, but I prefer to have these tags as they recommended in the latest release of Spring, which is 3.0.5. The strange thing is, that with these tags, it reads the messages_en.properties file and naturally displays the form in English, but does not do the switching to German upon clicking ‘de’, it remains as English.

Any help or directions will be most appreciated.

Many thanks,
Bolat

Bolat says:

Dear Viral,

I have one Final question and would appreciate a reply: I noticed that you have put HTML decimal ü to display the dotted u. Is there way of doing this directly by Typing the actual letter in the editor instead of giving numerical codes, especial for the dotless i (code ı) as when I put the dotless i directly (via Notepad using Windows 7 language for Tukish, mapped to keyboard key I), upon running the application, it comes out as ‘?’.

Many thanks.

Kind regards,
Bolat

Bolat says:

REVISED: Dear Viral,

I have one Final & quick question and would really appreciate a reply: I noticed that you have put the html decimal code 252 to display the dotted u / ü. Is there way of doing this directly without Typing the the codes, but rather type the actual letters in the Editor, especial for the Turkish dotless i / ı letter (html decimal code 305) as when I put the dotless i directly via an Editor using Windows 7 language for Turkish (mapped to keyboard key letter i), it comes out as ‘?’ when running this tutorial on the browser. This is IMPORTANT as I may have lots of translations to do and to put html decimal codes for each special character opens up room for potential errors and of course it is very time consuming. Any guidance on this matter will be much appreciated.

Many thanks.

Kind regards,
Bolat

CAD says:

Hi,
Great article, i have a question, Anyone know if can i access to messages with an expression like $message[‘code’] or something similar instead use spring:message tag?

Regards.
CAD

rojanu says:

@Bolat properties files can only be in ASCII therefore any character thats is not ASCII must presented in \u notation. native2ascii, which comes with java, used to convert the file e.g. “native2ascii -encoding utf-8 input.txt messages_tr.properties”

ram says:

Its really very useful. I really appreciate it. Thanks folks.

Kamil says:

Thanks, very useful. Do you have idea how to setup language switch in url like
http://domain/en/…. (english)
http://domain/… (english)
http://fomain/de/… (german)
etc.
so that website in english can be indexed by google bots

isha says:

I’m not getting different language when I’m clicking on the link “de”.
Even When I’m using by default other than english same ,english language is only coming…
Can anyone help me to know what misake I’m doing…….????

laff81 says:

Doesn’t work?

Try:

mvc:interceptors
bean id=”localeChangeInterceptor”
class=”org.springframework.web.servlet.i18n.LocaleChangeInterceptor”
property name=”paramName” value=”lang” /
/bean
/mvc:interceptors

And remove the bean “handlerMapping”.

Kam says:

Excellent tutorial. If you are working in IDE and not bothered about deployment, make sure that you declare your resource folder as Source folder so that the messages*.properties files are automatically deployed in /WEB-INF/classes folder.

Krzysztof Blaszke says:

Hi! Thak You for great tutorial! :-)
I had to add:

to my servlet-context.xml to applikaction work.
Best regards

K.B.

Kelvin says:

javax.servlet.jsp.JspTagException: No message found under code ‘label.title’ for locale ‘en’.

Tullio says:

After different experiments I defined my messageSource bean like this and it worked:

/WEB-INF/text/messages

Tullio says:

After different experiments I defined my messageSource bean like this and it worked:
beans:bean id=”messageSource” class=”org.springframework.context.support.ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource”
beans:property name=”basenames”
beans:list
beans:value>/WEB-INF/text/messages/beans:value
/beans:list
/beans:property
beans:property name=”defaultEncoding” value=”ISO-8859-1″ /
beans:property name=”cacheSeconds” value=”1″ /
/beans:bean

Sorry about the format…

Tharindu says:

How to stop it from going to RequestMapped method. Because I tried, and it was taken by the Controller method when I tried to change the language. Although lang request parameter is there, as it is coming from a URL which mapped to a RequestMapping in Controller class, it does not give me the intended result. Am I missing a piece of puzzle here? :(

Dorley Pan says:

I added chinese characters to the example (messages_zh.properties), but my chinese characters are not displayed properly (instead of actual characters there were shown as ?).

I tested by reverting to not using tiles2 and it will display the chinese characters correctly. How can chinese characters works with tiles2 ?

lakshmi says:

i need code without using those links en & de. Because in system itself we can select lang.. which we want.

Kandhi says:

Hi
I need the locale checking in js , ie I need to check the locale in document on ready for setting the message .But I couldn’t get the locale in js .
I used above method and my jsp is:

English
|
Arabic

this is working fine .

But in that pages a message came from document onload function , so i need to check the code

Japan Trivedi says:

Hi,

Thanks for the nice tutorial. But I have a problem while doing the same configuration using spring framework 3.1 without any xml.

I have created one application that uses no xml files for the web application using Spring Framework 3.1. I have done the above mentioned configuration for Internationalization in a java file that works exactly same way spring-servlet.xml works.

But I am not able to successfully implement internationalization.

Have you tried this??

Do you have any solution in this context.

Thanks.

Larry says:

Thanks for the tutorial – having an issue though (XML configuration is obviously not my string suit, and frankly driving me a little nuts).

I’ve placed my messages_en_US.properties file in ./src/main/webapp/resources/international, but haven’t found a way to resolve the location. Every time it runs, it’s throwing an error “Can’t find bundle for base name messages, locale en_US”, no matter how I prefix the location in the bean. I would have thought the mapping for /resources/ would have handled this, but if so, I’m stuck.

Secondary issue is that the “defaultEncoding” property name in messageSource bean fails with “No setter found for property ‘defaultEncoding'”. Less critical, but would like to know what’s up with that, too.

Running STS 2.9.1.RELEASE and using SpringFramework 3.1.0.RELEASE.

Hoping one of the brilliant developers who read this can help. Here’s my WEB-INF/spring/appServlet/servlet-context.xml file:

<!– –>

Amit says:

Thanks for the tutorial …

I’m using Spring 3.1.0 and configured in the same way but it is always taking value from default locale

Semika says:

My application is running on tomcat7. But this loads only the ‘en_US’ property file. After clicking on ‘de’ link, it does not load the relevant property files. Please help me.

Lukas says:

Hello
I have got problem i need to have got my properties file in external folder (not in war file)
so what i need to do ?
example my file example_en.properties is on /usr/local/websites/example/properties/example_en.properits ??
I think that i must extends class : org.springframework.context.support.ReloadableResourceBundleMessages
but i havent got any idea how to do it :(

Benni says:

Thx @Matthew Cachia for your answer:

with

we can fix the problem

Shiv Kumar Ganesh says:

Hi,
Since you have a really great blog and I too found some of the most interesting starting points here itself, I would recommend you to also help people to solve the problem which they face while practicing out your tutorials. I dont see any reply to the above messages and I am also suffering with the same problem. Please suggest a fix for the above. I know its not a forum but some help would be appreciated.

dcelso says:

Hi, I solved it replacing in the web.xml this two beans:

By this other subsection,

An to do it, you need add xmlns:mvc to the beans section. My beans sections it this:

Camel says:

Hi
I have same problem like many of you. After 2 hours found this link which help me.
For all of you who are using mvc:annotaion-driven … try this
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8738680/how-to-change-multi-languages-with-spring-on-project-egovframework
… or who don’t lile long texts like me … there is a code for application-context.xml

Michael says:

Hello everyone!
Thank you, very good explanation!
But I have one question, can you imagine that our site has a lot of articles and we want to have translation for two languages. I think, text of all articles storing in messages_de.properties and messages_en.properties it’s very bad idea. So my question is, how is it possible to handle it in Spring MVC?
Thank you!

Krzysztof says:

Doesn’t work for me
org.springframework.web.util.NestedServletException: Request processing failed; nested exception is org.apache.tiles.impl.CannotRenderException: ServletException including path ‘/WEB-INF/template/layout.jsp’.

Vadim Lotar says:

It’s brilliant article.
Thanks a lot.
I would like to add just one more thing in order to make it happens:

<interceptors>
        <beans:ref bean="localeChangeInterceptor"/>
</interceptors>

Without this piece of code, it does not work for me.

Chandan Gawri says:

Hello every one.
Even I got into same problem and tried every one’s approach. I am very new to spring framework.
Matthew Cachia: I could not find where i can fit servlet-context.xml in this demonstration.
Vadim Lotar: when i put this line into my spring-servlet.xml it just show error into configuration over tag.
Help required.

Biro says:

Hy,
thank you for the explanation
I have a question : how can i put this message into a confirmation box ? or alert ?

John says:

Hi, I have encountered problem with mapping to the controller when using

<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping">
		<property name="interceptors">
			<list>
				<ref bean="localeChangeInterceptor"/>
			</list>
		</property>
	</bean> 

, since it can’t map to my controller with localjost:8080/Spot.

However, if this bean is commented, my

org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet 

forwards properly to the controller

@Controller
public class HelloWorldController {

    @RequestMapping(value = "/", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public String handleRequest() {
        return "hello";
    }

}

faiza says:

how can i use springs internationalisation from a javascript..?
or is there a way to access .properties file contents from a javascript??
please help

extarc says:

Thankyou, Its working fine.but my requirement is I have to load the values in two hashMap variables from database table. How can we configure in the dispatcher servlet. Please help me

Adam Wu says:

How can I specify the message_en.properties in a specific path?
The folder structure is as below:
Jboss
|-message_en.properties
|-webapps
|-Spring3MVC.war

JavaFreak says:

Changing the bean as below worked. Also add messages.properties file

messages

<!– –>

sagar says:

How can we do multiple form based application in spring3

massimo says:

hi ,
I have my path esternal of web application and using Jboss as AS.
In my *-servlet.xml i’m using a variable to define a folder for *propeties :

how can i use your code :

many thanks for your article.
kings regard Massimo

Mamuka Arabuli says:

Hello everyone
what do you think , if users cookies are disabled, will cookielocaleresolver do it’s work?

Mamuka Arabuli says:

nice tutorial
what is better way to use cookielocaleresolver or sessionlocaleresolver?
cookies may be turned off…

vikas yadav says:

No message found under code ‘label.title’ for locale ‘en’

ths is the error message
can anyone tell whats going wrong

Niklas Rtz says:

Thanks! This tutorial works right away for my setup: IntelliJ + Spring.

K. Amin says:

Thanks Viral. All your tutorials works like a charm without any issue. Very helpful…….

Sandip says:

Hi,
I want to access sprinig messages in javascript how can i do this?
pls provide tutorial.
Thanks

Boechi says:

The DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping is depricated.
Solution for this is the following:

<mvc:annotation-driven/>
<mvc:interceptors>
		<ref bean=&quot;localChangeInterceptor&quot;/>
</mvc:interceptors>

Boechi says:

The DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping is depricated.
Solution for this is the following:

MM says:

Just a small hint: The german translation of “Add contacts” is wrong ;)
You translated it with an “mathematical addition” which doesn’t make sense here. Instead “Kontakt hinzufügen” is the appropriate translation and used in most of the applications out there :)

Yuva Kumar R says:

Hi Viral

Thanks for your nice tutorial, but am struck with this example…am getting “No message found under code ‘label.title’ for locale ‘en’”. can you tell whats going wrong, I have the resource folder with name “resources” under src folder as suggested by you. following is the file path…

Spring3MVC1\src\resources\messages_en.properties.

The content of the messages_en.properties is as follows :

label.firstname=First Name
label.lastname=Last Name
label.email=Email
label.telephone=Telephone
label.addcontact=Add Contact

label.menu=Menu
label.title=Contact Manager

label.footer=© test.net

Thanks for your valuable articles.

Yuva

quest says:

Very nice example. works fine

Aditya says:

Thanks a lot viral….

pushpa kumari says:

really its nice…….thanku so much….

Sudhir says:

Can you please share multi language font used in web application ? Browser needs to show different language fonts…

Muhammad Gulfam says:

its a great blog. learnt a lot from this.
this blog explains very well that how can we change the contents of labels on the base of selected languages.
but can you please explain how can we do this for the contents that is selected at run time. like the error messages
overall its great.

SVK PETO says:

How to do it, if my site dont allow GET requests, but only POST?

venkat says:

Hi this is very nice tutorial and worked perfectly, but i need same thing without refreshing the page,
if we use anchor tag then page will get refresh and previously entered values will be loss, so i dont want to do refresh but it should change the language, please help me on this.
thanks in advance.

Sarah says:

Viral, you write great articles, this one included. I would love to see it expanded to cover i18n and L10n for validation (error messages).

srikanth says:

suppose if need to support 30 different regional language. Will we creating 30 properites file ? Please advice how will design the application.

Sylvester says:

Hi Viral

I have a requirement wherein a form textarea should accept data in different languages, like names (in French, German, etc.). Now when I try to submit the for, the data in the foreign languages gets changed to some garbage values. Can you suggest how can this be handled and as such, allow me to input data in the textarea in different languages?