How to create a resource provider

• 3 minutes to read
 • 3 minutes to read

All resource providers must be compiled in .Net assemblies. SuperOffice provider a base class in the SuperOffice.Plugins.dll called ResourceDllProviderBase, which makes it easy to get started.

Implementations must decorate the class with the ResourceProvider attribute, which NetServer will use to discover and load at runtime. The first parameter must be a name that uniquely identifies your provider. The second parameter is a priority number that can force your provider to be called before others, and thus override already-existing stuff. This is not normally a recommended practice, however, the lowest priority value is used first. SuperOffice default priority values are int.MaxValue divided by 2. If another provider that includes the same resource names with a lower priority value, such as int.MaxValue / 3, it takes precedence and overrides default resources supplied by SuperOffice.

The constructor expects two parameters:

  • the name of the executing assembly
  • the name of the resx resource files that contains the language-specific text resources.

Code example

[ResourceProvider( "PartnerXResourceProvider", int.MaxValue )]
public class ResourceProvider : ResourceDllProviderBase
{
  public ResourceProvider()
    : base( System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(), ".Resources" )
  {
  }
}

Dependencies

Assemblies must be declared in the application's configuration file. The key here is not special or mapped to anything else. It only needs to unique from other assemblies declared in the DynamicLoad section. The value must be the name of the resource assembly.

The value is optionally a full path, or when placed in the applications directory only needs to be the name of the assembly.

<SuperOffice>
  ...
  <Factory>
    <DynamicLoad>
    ...
      <!-- Add custom plugins etc here -->
      <add key="UniqueName" value="UniqueName.Resources.dll" />
    </DynamicLoad>
  </Factory>
  ...
</SuperOffice>

Example .NET project

In the example below, the project uses the NuGet package SuperOffice.NetServer.Core to easily get a reference to the SuperOffice.Plugins.dll.

Example .Net project

Resource Codes

Abbreviation Country
cs Czech (Czech Republic)
da Danish
de German
en-us English - United States
es Spanish
fi Finnish
fr French
it Italian
ja Japanese
nl Dutch
no Norwegian
pl Polish
default (see image) English - United Kingdom
ru Russian
sv Swedish
zh-cn Chinese (S)

Do it yourself

If you have special requirements, implement the IResourceProvider interface, or override the base class implementation. The methods CanInitialize(), Initialize(), GetSupportedLanguages(), and GetResource(string symbol) are easy to understand and implement.

The idea behind CanInitialize is that some providers may need database access, and so they should not be initialized too early. By doing a quick check and returning true only when everything is ready, you can postpone the initialization to the correct moment.