Jakarta Struts Cookbook

12.9. Localizing Look and Feel

Problem

You want your HTML pages to have a different style depending on the user's locale.

Solution

Use a combination of a global Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and a locale-specific style sheet. The paths for the style sheets are stored as resource bundle properties. Because style sheets are merged, you only need to override those locale-specific styles that are different than the global styles.

Using Struts tags

<style>
    <!--
        <bean:define id="globalStyle">
            <bean:message key="css.global"/>
        </bean:define>
        @import url(<html:rewrite page="<%=globalStyle%>"/>);

        <bean:define id="localStyle">
            <bean:message key="css.local"/>
        </bean:define>
        @import url(<html:rewrite page="<%=localStyle%>"/>);
    -->
</style>

Using JSTL tags

<style>
    <!--
    <fmt:message key="css.global" var="globalStyle"/>
    @import url(<c:url value="${globalStyle}"/>)

    <fmt:message key="css.local" var="localStyle"/>
    @import url(<c:url value="${localStyle}"/>)
    -->
</style>

Discussion

Style sheets can be chosen and applied based on locale in the same manner that images are retrieved as shown in Recipe 12.7. You can use the Struts tags or the JSTL tags. Use bean:message or fmt:message to retrieve a context-relative style sheet path. For example, you would configure paths for a global and locale-specific style sheet in your base resource bundle (ApplicationResources.properties):

css.global=/styles/global.css
css.local=/styles/local.css

The locale-specific file, /styles/local.css, needs to be defined but doesn't need ...