Best state-management for multi language support?

Question

I have a small web application that has multi-language support (en, de, it, fr, nl, sl, hr). This application is accessed constantly from a lot of users that use it for a short time (the time to fill their data to get an internet access code).

I have a problem with setting the culture similar to this thread: InitializeCulture change language of domain

I know how to do it, it's just that I'm not sure which state-management to use. I wanted to ask for suggestions which method to use. Those are my thoughts:

Session - the easiest way and the more elegant, but it's server side and I have a lot of requests so I fear that the server can get too overloaded

Cookie - easy to implement and it's client side, but some users have cookies disabled in their browser

QueryString - not so easy to implement in this phase, but it's client side and can be easily tested because the application has only 3 forms (3 URLs to add query string parameters)

I'd like to hear your ideas and suggestions.

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Actual persistence store would actually depend upon the scope/life-time of culture selection. For example, if it's user specific selection that has to be persisted over sessions then you can use database or persistent cookie where cookie will remember for a machine and database will remember across machines. The retrieval (from database) will happen when it's needed - and the value can be cached into ASP.NET cache (will need different key per user) or session or view-state (if its single page application) etc.

You shouldn't worry too much about putting that into session if you are already using session state for something else. In such case, it doesn't really consume any significant memory. If you have log out function then you can explicitly clear the session state and release that little bit of memory. If you don't have log out functionality then you can use small value for session timeout.