#766 – WPF Data Binding Ignores Custom Formatting

February 28, 2013 Leave a comment

You can get the WPF data binding engine to respect the current locale, as specified in the Region applet, by setting the Language property of a FrameworkElement to the language tag that is part of the CurrentCulture property.

Doing this allows you to set up the proper locale in a single line of code and data binding will use the correct rules for formatting dates and floating point numbers for the appropriate language.

This mechanism won’t, however, honor any custom formatting that you specify in the Region applet.  A custom format is anything that you change from the defaults in the Region applet.

766-001

If you want the data binding engine to completely respect all of the settings chosen in the Region applet, you can set the ConverterCulture property to the CurrentCulture, for each binding.

        <TextBlock Text="{Binding BoundDate, ConverterCulture={x:Static glob:CultureInfo.CurrentCulture}}"/>

The glob namespace points to System.Globalization.

766-002

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#762 – Set FlowDirection at Runtime Based on CurrentUICulture

February 22, 2013 2 Comments

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:
762-001
And on an Arabic version of Windows, we now get:
762-002

Filed under Layout Tagged with , , , , , ,