#762 – Set FlowDirection at Runtime Based on CurrentUICulture

The FlowDirection property of a FrameworkElement (including a Window) indicates how child elements of an element should be layed out–left to right (what we are used to in the US), or right to left.

FlowDirection should typically be set to match the text direction of the language being used to render text in your user interface.  If text in your application is in Arabic, the letters will run right to left, so your GUI should also be layed out right to left.

You’ll normally load text resources based on the CurrentUICulture property, which is meant to indicate the target language for your application.  So you should also set the flow direction based on information pointed to by CurrentUICulture.

For example:

        public MainWindow()
        {
            InitializeComponent();

            this.FlowDirection =
                CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture.TextInfo.IsRightToLeft ?
                    FlowDirection.RightToLeft :
                    FlowDirection.LeftToRight;
        }

On an English version of Windows, we get:

And on an Arabic version of Windows, we now get: