Editing e-commerce website values

Question

Each product in my e-commerce website has Arabic and English values for the title, description and excerpt. I have this method EditProduct to update those values based on current culture (Arabic or English)

public void EditProduct(string element, string text1, string text2, bool edit1, bool edit2, string culture)
{
    var product = DoSomeMagicToGetAProduct();

    if (element == "title")
    {
        if (culture == "en")
        {
            if (edit1)
            {
                product.Title = text1;
            }
            if (edit2)
            {
                product.TitleAr = text2;
            }
        }

        if (culture == "ar")
        {
            if (edit1)
            {
                product.TitleAr = text1;
            }
            if (edit2)
            {
                product.Title = text2;
            }
        }
    }

    if (element == "description")
    {
        // similar codes here
    }

    if (element == "excerpt")
    {
        // similar codes here
    }

    product.Save();

}

The method works well, but I think I can improve the way I write it to be more elegant. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I think the code is a little dodgy, and the design is dodgy. I'd store the translation in a dictionary of some sort.

But addressing your immediate question, to simplify the code you have, you could do....

public void EditProduct(string element, string text1, string text2, bool edit1, bool edit2, string culture)
        {
            var product = DoSomeMagicToGetAProduct();

            var arText = culture == "ar" ? text1 : text2;
            var enText = culture == "en" ? text1 : text2;
            var updateEn = culture == "en" ? edit1 : edit2;
            var updateAr = culture == "ar" ? edit1 : edit2;

            if (element == "title")
            {
                if (updateEn) product.Title = enText;
                if (updateAr) product.TitleAr = arText;                    
            }

            if (element == "description")
            {
                if (updateEn) product.Description = enText;
                if (updateAr) product.DescriptionAr = arText;   
            }

            if (element == "excerpt")
            {
                if (updateEn) product.Excerpt = enText;
                if (updateAr) product.ExcerptAr = arText;   
            }

            product.Save();

        }

Answer 2

You should try using a switch statement for the languages. Also move the languages to be the first statements to check instead of the element. This combined should reduce the size of your code.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/06tc147t%28v=vs.80%29.aspx

Then for the edit booleans you can do this instead.

            if (edit1)
            {
                product.Title = text1;
            }
            else 
            {
                product.TitleAr = text2;
            }

Answer 3

Why should you need if-else for culture change? .Net resources is the way to show localized web pages as per culture on user machine. You should have just one product.title field and 2 resource files, one neutral culture which contains english words and another 'ar' culture which holds the arabic translation.

Refer to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms227427.aspx for an overview of asp.net resources.

Hope this helps. If I am missing something here please post.