In the last couple of weeks I came across multiple posts on Stack Overflow and the SDN forum, where someone needs to switch a specific Sitecore context property for some reason. Let’s take the Sitecore.Context.Language: we need to change the language, do some actions (i.e. loading some items in this language) and change the language back to the one before.

I saw, that most of the users do this fully manual:

1. Buffer the current language in a variable
2. Set the new language with Sitecore.Context.SetLanguage()
3. Do whatever needs to be done
4. Reset the language with the one in the temporary variable

Yes, this works. If error handling is ok and resetting the language is done in a finally-block, everything is ok. But do you know that there is a much simpler way to do this?

So basically, the IDisposable is a very good way to achieve this: Set the new language in the constructor and reset to the old language while disposing. Then simply use the class in a using-block. Sitecore has exactly done this with the LanguageSwitcher:

var myItem = Sitecore.Context.Item;
using (new Sitecore.Globalization.LanguageSwitcher("de"))
{
    myItem = myItem.Database.GetItem(myItem.ID);
}

You have neither to care about resetting the language nor to implement a try-finally block and custom exception handling (as long as your language given in the constructor is valid). Isn’t it very easy?

Sitecore offers different “switchers”, the mostly used ones are:

• Sitecore.Globalization.LanguageSwitcher for switching the Sitecore.Context.Language.
• Sitecore.Sites.SiteContextSwitcher for switching the Sitecore.Context.Site.
• Sitecore.Data.DatabaseSwitcher for switching the Sitecore.Context.Database, i.e. to read something out of the master database on a delivery environment (but be careful with this!).
• Sitecore.Security.Accounts.UserSwitcher for switching the Sitecore.Context.User, i.e. to execute some code with administrator permissions.