#765 – WPF Data Binding Ignores CurrentCulture
February 27, 2013 5 Comments
Using the ToString method on numeric and date-based types from within your code, the output will reflect the current culture, as stored in the CurrentCulture property of the current thread.
When the data binding mechanism in WPF converts numeric or date-based data to a string, however, it doesn’t automatically use the current culture. Instead, you must set the Language property of the FrameworkElement where the binding is occurring. You typically set this property based on the CurrentCulture property of the current thread. You can set the Language property of the topmost user-interface element, so that all of the other elements inherit the value.
public MainWindow()
{
InitializeComponent();
this.DataContext = this;
this.Language = XmlLanguage.GetLanguage(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.IetfLanguageTag);
}
We can now do binding as follows (where BoundDate property is of type DateTime):
<TextBlock Text="{Binding BoundDate, StringFormat=d}"/>
Now if we run with the region set to French (France), we see:
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It might be of interest to know that there is an unfortunate difference between XmlLanguge and CultureInfo. The XmlLanguage setting will NOT take into account any customization that have been made to the Regional settings in Windows. You will always get the standard settings for the specified region. CultureInfo.CurrentCulture handles this correctly though.
Right–this is happening because you’re not pointing the Language property back to a full CultureInfo object that includes the customizations, but you’re just giving it a language tag. You can use the ConvertCulture property on the binding to point back to the actual CultureInfo object. This is clumsy, but works. See http://wpfglue.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/localized-value-formatting-in-wpf/
You could also just make it a habit of always binding to locale-specific strings, i.e. strings that have already been converted based on the current culture. This is probably the more common approach in production code that is localized.
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