Package	mx.resources
Interface	public interface IResourceBundle
Implementors	ResourceBundle

Language Version:

ActionScript 3.0

Product Version:

Flex 3

Runtime Versions:

Flash Player 9, AIR 1.1

The IResourceBundle and IResourceManager interfaces work together to provide localization support for Flex applications.

There are three main concepts involved in localization: locales, resources, and resource bundles.

A locale specifies a language and a country for which your application has been localized. For example, the locale "en_US" specifies English as spoken in the United States. (See the mx.resources.Locale class for more information.)

A resource is a named value that is locale-dependent. For example, your application might have a resource whose name is "OPEN" and whose value for an English locale is "Open" but whose value for a French locale is "Ouvrir".

A resource bundle is a named group of resources whose values have been localized for a particular locale. A resource bundle is identified by the combination of its bundleName and its locale, and has a content Object that contains the name-value pairs for the bundle's resources.

The IResourceBundle interface represents a specific resource bundle. However, most applications will only need to use IResourceManager. A single ResourceManager object implementing this interface manages multiple resource bundles, possibly for multiple locales, and provides access to the resources that they contain. For example, you can retrieve a specific resource as a String by calling resourceManager.getString(bundleName, resourceName). By changing the localeChain property of the ResourceManager, you can change which resource bundles are searched for resource values.

Generally, you do not create resource bundles yourself; instead, they are usually compiled from *.properties files. A properties file named MyResources.properties produces a resource bundle with "MyResources" for its bundleName. You generally produce multiple versions of each properties file, one for each locale that your application supports.

Flex properties files are similar to Java properties files, except that they also support MXML's Embed() and ClassReference() directives. These directives work the same way in a properties file as they do in a CSS file, producing class references. Also, the encoding for Flex properties files is always assumed to be UTF-8.

The Flex framework's resources have been localized for U.S. English (the "en_US" locale) and for Japanese (the "ja_JP" locale). The framework resources are organized into multiple bundles corresponding to framework packages; for example, the "formatters" bundle is used by classes in the mx.formatters package. (There is also a "SharedResources" bundle for resources used by multiple packages.)

The properties files for the framework resources, such as formatters.properties, can be found in the frameworks/projects/framework/bundles/{locale}/src directories of the Flex SDK. Your applications normally link against the Flex framework as a precompiled library, framework.swc, in the frameworks/libs directory. This library has no resources in it. Instead, the framework resources have been compiled into separate resource bundle libraries such as framework_rb.swc. These are located in the frameworks/locales/{locale} directories and your application must also link in one or more of these.

You are free to organize your application's own resources into whatever bundles you find convenient. If you localize your application for locales other than "en_US" and "ja_JP", you should localize the framework's properties files for those locales as well and compile additional resource bundle libaries for them.

When your application starts, the ResourceManager is automatically populated with whatever resource bundles were compiled into the application. If you create a code module, by default the resources that its classes need are compiled into the module. When the module is loaded into an application, any bundles that the application does not already have are added to the ResourceManager.

You can compile "resource modules" that have only resources in them, and load them with the loadResourceModule() method of the ResourceManager. With resource modules, you can support multiple locales by loading the resources you need at run time rather than compiling them into your application.

Although the ResourceManager is normally populated with resource bundles that were compiled into your application or loaded from modules, you can also programmatically create resource bundles and add them to the ResourceManager yourself with the addResourceBundle() method.

See also

---

      var rb:IResourceBundle = new ResourceBundle("fr_FR", "MyResources");
      rb.content["LANGUAGE"] = "Francais";
      rb.content["GREETING"] = "Bonjour";
      

      LANGUAGE=English
      MINIMUM_AGE=18
      ENABLED=true
      LOGO=Embed("logo.png")