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I highly recommend that you organize your entries by source file like this, and you can also use
multiple resource files if you like, as explained in the next section. Also be careful about how you reuse
the same string that occurs in multiple places. If it’s for the same kind of UI with the same intent, that’s
fine, but if the usage context is different it’s better to duplicate the string as they might translate
differently in other languages. In the resources above, notice how I also included a comment for
location_formatShort because the word “At” by itself probably needs more context to translate properly.
With the strings separated as resources, we can now use the resource loader to obtain those strings
at run time. This can be done in two ways. First is with the WinRT APIs directly, namely
Windows.ApplicationModel.Resources.ResourceLoader.getString:
var loader = new Windows.ApplicationModel.Resources.ResourceLoader();
var text = loader.getString('location_formatShort');
or, more simply, with the WinJS.Resources.getString wrapper:
var text = WinJS.Resources.getString('location_formatShort').value;
that also happens to work in the web context where WinRT isn’t defined (see Scenario 12 of the
Application resources and localization sample.) Note that getString returns an object that includes a
value property with the string along with lang and an empty flag indicating if the resource wasn’t found.
The WinJS method, being one line, is clearly helpful in cases like our settings commands because we
can call it inline. Thus, in our code we just replace the string literals with the WinJS call, such as the
following in pages/home/home.js:
data.properties.title = WinJS.Resources.getString('about_command').value;
and the following inside the object for the Settings commands:
"about": { title: WinJS.Resources.getString('about_command').value,
href: "/html/about.html" },
Note that WinJS, being optimized for common scenarios, supports loading strings in the user’s
default language only. The WinRT ResourceLoader class, on the other hand, is much more flexible and
can load a string for any specific language. You’ll need to use that API when your requirements exceed
what WinJS provides.
And that’s really it for JavaScript. If you’ve made these changes to your app, now is a good time to
use the Build > Build Solution command in Visual Studio. This will compile the resources.resjson file into
a more efficient binary format called resources.pri, ignoring entries that begin with an underscore.
Doing an occasional build (without string the app) is a good practice when working with resources so
that you can clean up any problems in your files, such as duplicate entries or syntax errors. Then you can
run the app to see the resource loader in action—mostly by seeing no difference from the app as it was
before! Be sure to test all the code paths that were affected, however, to ensure that all the strings are
being loaded properly.
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