Resx strings can be technical debt

October 14, 2015 · 1 min read

I’m working on a project that requires translation using .Net’s Resx capabilities. This project is 2 years old and counting and our duplication and disorganization of our Resx strings are very apparent. This is a form of Technical Debt and we realized that it is time to pay some of it off before we’re in too deep. I just spent the morning replacing all of our required validation message from 28 different flavors of “X must be selected”, “Y cannot be empty”, “You need to set an email address.", ”Z must be chosen”. These message are shown directly under the input field in the form, so context already gives is meaning.

All of these strings have been translated to several languages already. Each time a new language is added we have to pay someone to translate. This is real money that has to be spent. It also complicates the validation code and HTML bindings.

The solution for us was to identify these strings, put them in an Excel spreadsheet, then have a developer (me) use the immensely helpful Resx Manager extension to remove these one by one, update code to replace them with one string in our CommonStrings.resx. requiredFieldMessage = “This is a required field.”.

We lose some specificity, but gain a lot.

Lesson Learned

Remember to think about the debt you are incurring on all aspects of your project and have a plan to pay it off when it occurs. We could have had some naming standards earlier for our Resx keys, avoided this waste of translating and duplication, and simplified code and process.

Now I’m off to simplify all of our loading messages.

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Aligned

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