overriding locale (swing l&f)

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

I’m trying to get JFileChooser to display in english (defaults to german on my system). While localization is arguably a good thing, right at this moment for these small Swing apps (to be used internally) I don’t want it stuffed down my throat. So I’ve tried all of the following method calls:

from main():
Locale.setDefault(Locale.US);
System.setProperty(“user.language”, “en”);
System.setProperty(“user.country”, “US”);
UIManager.getDefaults().setDefaultLocale(new Locale(“en”, “US”));
JFileChooser.setDefaultLocale(new Locale(“en”, “US”));

and from actionPerformed():
fc.setLocale(new Locale(“en”, “”, “”)); // fc is instance of JFIleChooser

But the dialog box still shows up in german. Now if I pass -Duser.language=en -Duser.region=US to the vm it works just fine, but is there no programmatic way of getting around this? Or am I just missing some very fundamental concept?

#2

I’ve tried this on my machine and it works just fine here. I simply added

static {
  Locale.setDefault(new Locale("fr", "BE"));
}

to the class containing the main method and this has the expected behavior of making swing french.

#3

Are you web-starting (JWS) the app? I don’t know anything about how Locale works, but since JWS loads Swing before any code of your program starts, if Locale must be set at start-up (and can’t be changed) then the VM option in the JNLP file may be the only way to go.

Keith

#4

No JWS, but launched from within Eclipse. Thank you, the static block worked perfectly. =)