MvvmCross localization: switch at runtime

Is there a way to change the current language to another one at runtime ?

For example: be able to switch when a button is clicked or when starting the app, get the user language and switch.

How to tell the plugin to check the user language at startup ?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Is there a way to change the current language to another one at runtime ?

yes, call builder.LoadResources(whichLanguage) on your MvxTextProviderBuilder.cs

For example: be able to switch when a button is clicked

The UI framework isn't really setup to perform switching live. When you switch between languages then the new JSON resource files will all be loaded OK - but existing displayed text will not be updated. This is a bit like most mobile operating systems - if you want to switch language you often need to reboot!

If you wanted to add dynamic switching then you'd have to find a way to tell the UI to completely refresh all text - I suspect this wouldn't be hard to do, but it might require some manual coding on every page/View which has already been created and displayed :/

or when starting the app, get the user language and switch.

This is a much more straight-forward way to do i18n. It's normally OK because MvvmCross mainly targets phones - and phones are normally single user devices which don't switch languages very often.

You could, for example, use some variable (e.g. System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture) to work out the best language to display.
Or you detect on load whether the user has picked a language yet - if they have, then show HomeViewModel - if they haven't then show a LanguagePickerViewModel - this is what we did in StarWarsKinect - the StartNavigationObject is a perfect place for this sort of logic!

How to tell the plugin to check the user language at startup ?

Currently, you'll have to code this logic as part of your app startup.

I'd definitely be open to providing an improved plugin on this - perhaps with a demo!

If you are looking at i18n, then one alternative implementation to consider is Vernacular - the team at Rdio have a very good offering for Mono and MS platforms - https://github.com/rdio/vernacular