Plurality in user messages

Question

Many times, when generating messages to show to the user, the message will contain a number of something that I want to inform the customer about.

I\'ll give a

Answer 1

I had this exact same question posed to me yesterday by a member of our team.

Since it came up again here on StackOverflow I figured the universe was telling me to have a bash at producing a decent solution.

I've quickly put something together and it's by no means perfect however it might be of use or spark some discussion/development.

This code is based on the idea that there can be 3 messages. One for zero items, one for one item and one for more than one item which follow the following structure:

singlePropertyName
singlePropertyName_Zero
singlePropertyName_Plural

I've created an internal class to test with in order to mimick the resource class. I haven't tested this using an actual resource file yet so I'm yet to see the full result.

Here's the code (currently i've included some generics where I know I could have specified the third param simply as a Type and also the second param is a string, I think there's a way to combine these two parameters into something better but I'll come back to that when I have a spare moment.

    public static string GetMessage(int count, string resourceSingularName, T resourceType) where T : Type
{
    var resourcePluralName = resourceSingularName + "_Plural";
    var resourceZeroName = resourceSingularName + "_Zero";
    string resource = string.Empty;
    if(count == 0)
    {
        resource = resourceZeroName;
    }
    else{
        resource = (count <= 1)? resourceSingularName : resourcePluralName;
    }
    var x = resourceType.GetProperty(resource).GetValue(Activator.CreateInstance(resourceType),null);

    return x.ToString();
}

Test resource class:

internal class TestMessenger
{
    public string Tester{get{
    return "Hello World of one";}}
    public string Tester_Zero{get{
    return "Hello no world";}}
    public string Tester_Plural{get{
    return "Hello Worlds";}}
}

and my quick executing method

void Main()
{
    var message = GetMessage(56, "Tester",typeof(TestMessenger));
    message.Dump();
}