Sharing Language Keys Between Your Portlets

It’s likely that you’ll have messages that you want to localize that aren’t already implemented in one of Liferay’s core language keys. You’ll need to specify these language keys in one or more resource bundles in your plugin. If one of your portlets will be used in the Control Panel and you want to localize its title and description, it’s best to use a separate resource bundle for that portlet. If none of your portlets will be used in the Control Panel, then the portlets can share the same resource bundle.

You can share a resource bundle between portlets by adding a resource bundle to the portlets’ project. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll know how to share a resource bundle between multiple portlets in your project. Figure 1 below shows two portlets displaying the same language key from a shared resource bundle:

Figure 1: When portlets share the same resource bundle they can display the same textual elements, based on language keys from that resource bundle.

Let’s begin sharing a single resource bundle with multiple portlets!

For this tutorial, assume that both portlets you’re working with are contained in the same project.

In your project’s docroot/WEB-INF/src/content/Language.properties file, add your desired language key.

Here’s an example language key:
```
 you-know-it-is-the-best=You know it is the best
```
In your project’s docroot/WEB-INF/src/content folder, create another translation of the language key file for a language of your choice, and add the same language keys translated to that language.

For example, if you were translating to Spanish, you would create a file Language_es.properties in the docroot/WEB-INF/src/content folder. Here, you’d enter the same language keys as you did in your Language.properties file, but with Spanish values. Here’s the example language key from step one translated to Spanish:
```
 you-know-it-is-the-best=Usted sabe que es la mejor
```
You can view Liferay’s available locales in the Language and Time Zones section of the Portal Properties.
For all the portlets that are to share the language keys, edit their view JSP files to use the language keys.

For example, to use a language key named you-know-it-is-the-best in a <liferay-ui:message> tag, you could specify this:
```
Liferay - <liferay-ui:message key="you-know-it-is-the-best" />!
```
This line brings your translated language key value into your JSP. You can reference a sample portlet’s view.jsp for an example of how to use a Liferay UI message in your JSP.

Make sure to specify any required taglibs you’re using to display your language keys. For example, to use the liferay-ui taglib, you could declare the following line in your JSP:
```
<%@ taglib uri="http://liferay.com/tld/ui" prefix="liferay-ui" %> 
```
Navigate to the portlet.xml file for your project. Make sure that all the portlets have the same resource-bundle specified. If the portlets specify the same resource bundle, they’re sharing it. The portlet.xml file code snippet below exemplifies what this can look like for two portlets:
```
 <portlet>
     <portlet-name>yourportlet1</portlet-name>
     ...
     <resource-bundle>content.Language</resource-bundle>
     <portlet-info>
     ...
 </portlet>
 <portlet>
     <portlet-name>yourportlet2</portlet-name>
     ...
     <resource-bundle>content.Language</resource-bundle>
     <portlet-info>
     ...
 </portlet>
```
It’s important to check that the resource-bundle element is in the proper place in the portlet element when developing your own app. See the portlet.xml file’s schema http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/portlet/portlet-app_2_0.xsd for details.
Redeploy the plugin project and place the portlets on a page, if you haven’t already done so. Verify that they display the same intended messages based on your resource bundle.
Switch your portal’s locale to the alternate language by adding the language’s two letter abbreviation in the context of the URL and refreshing the page.

For example, to display the portlets in a Spanish context on localhost:8080, your URL would look like this:
```
 localhost:8080/es
```
Notice how the portlets display your translated language keys.

Figure 2: This figure displays two portlets sharing a Spanish translation of a language key from the same resource bundle. Sharing resource bundles between multiple portlets helps you leverage common translated text.

At this point, any language keys you specify in the language properties files are accessible from all of your plugin project’s portlets.

In this tutorial, you created language keys, specified the language key values in different languages translations, and shared the new language keys among your plugin project’s portlets.

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