Posted under JSF
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Tags CSS, HTML, JSF, Locale, Tip, Web
A common issue I have found is setting confirmation dialog widths correctly to hold the target message neatly.
With a Primefaces p:confirmDialog for example, the height auto adjusts but the width defaults to 300 pixels, and is set via an integer width attribute.
When supporting multiple languages, message sizes and sentence structure obviously differ, and it can be desirable to change the dialog width for example. Whilst a large width could be chosen which is likely to support any language, this can look less than perfect due to the extra unwanted space.
One simple solution which I came up with is just to store the dialog width in the Message Bundle along with the message. This way, the dialog width will automatically adjust to the value set for the target locale when switching locales. The same idea could be used to set a width etc. via CSS as well.
Whilst I am in no way suggesting turning a message bundle into a style sheet, this is a clean solution for this particular simple case and others like it, especially as the width is set as a component attribute and not in CSS, so style sheet localisation is not a possibility. Style sheet/resource localisation is available in JSF 2, but is somewhat non-intuitive. (Core JSF 3 p113-114 opines that it is an unappealing solution, and hopes for a better implementation in a future JSF release.)