Jakarta Struts Cookbook

12.7. Displaying Locale-Specific Images

Problem

Your Struts application needs to show a graphic image specific to a user's locale.

Solution

Create a property in the locale's resource bundle specifying the path to the image source file. Here's an example from a Spanish locale properties file (ApplicationResouces_es.properties) file:

# spanish language properties
img.source.yes=images/es/yes.gif

Use the html:img tag with the srcKey or pageKey attribute set to the property key:

<html:img border="0" srcKey="img.source.yes"/>

Discussion

Most production web applications use images extensively. Images are frequently used, in place of text, for buttons and links. In many cases, images are used to create "fancy" buttons, as shown in Figure 12-1.

Figure 12-1. Using images for buttons

If the user speaks Spanish, Figure 12-1 must be modified since the text message needs to be translated to Spanish and the "yes" button should be changed to "sì." The text can be localized using the bean:message or fmt:message tag (Recipe 12.6). For the button images, you can use the html:img to retrieve a locale-specific image and generate an appropriate HTML img element. The html:img tag supports two attributes, srcKey and pageKey, which allow you to specify a key, to be looked up from a resource bundle. The bundle's value dictates the path to the file. The path will be retrieved from the default Struts MessageResources ...