Exception message localization

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Vagif Abilov - 26 Oct 2005 08:33 GMT

I am somewhat confused with Brad Abrahms' Exception Message Guidelines
(http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2004/01/28/64255.aspx), also published
now in the book. One of his suggestions is:

"Do localize exception message".

This works fine as long as the application runs in a desktop. It gets more
complicated when we are in a client/server environment, and server does not
always know about client's culture. Let's say exception is thrown by a back
office application that rejects to run financial transaction. The server may
be totally unaware of user's regional and cultural settings. Still it needs
to set Exception's Message property, and it is recommended to be localized.

So we in our development team came to conclusion that we can't use Message
property to display a message to end-user. We will need to build separate
resource tables that will contain local exception message texts. And Message
can only be used internally for debugging purposes.

Has anyone come to a better appoach?

Best regards

Vagif Abilov
Oslo Norway

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Nicole Calinoiu - 26 Oct 2005 15:45 GMT

>I am somewhat confused with Brad Abrahms' Exception Message Guidelines
>(http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2004/01/28/64255.aspx), also published
>now in the book. One of his suggestions is:
>
> "Do localize exception message".

These guidelines are targeted at API developers. The "user" mentioned in
the guidelines is actually a developer that is programming against an API,
not an end-user of an application. Requirements for localizing exception
messages within your own applications may differ quite a bit from these
general API guidelines.

> This works fine as long as the application runs in a desktop. It gets more
> complicated when we are in a client/server environment, and server does
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> Still it needs to set Exception's Message property, and it is recommended
> to be localized.

In this scenario, the server-side exception message should probably never be
seen by the client user. There are several reasons for this, not least of
which is that the server-side error message might expose information about
potential security weaknesses that could be exploited by a malicious end
user. If you are going to log server-side exceptions, the exception
messages should be localized into a language that their eventual consumer
will understand. This would usually be the server or application
administrator, whose language choice could be very different from that of
the end user.

> So we in our development team came to conclusion that we can't use Message
> property to display a message to end-user. We will need to build separate
> resource tables that will contain local exception message texts. And
> Message can only be used internally for debugging purposes.

Good idea all around, assuming that your client-side exception messages do
not reveal potentially "sensitive" information about the application and its
supporting services and infrastructure.

> Has anyone come to a better appoach?

The only approach that might be even "better" would be allowing viewing-time
localization of a server-side exception log in case administrators have
different language preferences. Unfortunately, while you might be able to
do this for your own exceptions, you won't be able to do a proper job of
this for the exceptions thrown up from within the .NET Framework itself, so
it's probably not worth the bother unless the relevant members of your
application/server support team really do not share a common language.

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Vagif Abilov - 26 Oct 2005 16:10 GMT

Thanks Nicole! I have now better confidence in our approach :-)

Vagif

>>I am somewhat confused with Brad Abrahms' Exception Message Guidelines
>>(http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2004/01/28/64255.aspx), also
[quoted text clipped - 45 lines]
> relevant members of your application/server support team really do not
> share a common language.

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