Doing localization in visualstatemanager by changing x:uid?

Question

I am adding localization to my UWP app by adding x:uid tags to all of my elements and using the multilingual toolkit. However I've run into an issue where in one case I change the text itself in the narrow view using the visualstatemanager. How can I do this in a localized app? My first thought would be to change the uid of the element to the new match the new text, I'm not sure it's possible.

Here is an example of what I'd like to do, but doesn't work:

 <textblock x:Name="DescriptionTextBox" x:uid="DescriptionTextBox"/> // Normal long description

 ....

              <VisualState x:Name="NarrowState">
                <VisualState.StateTriggers>
                    <AdaptiveTrigger MinWindowWidth="0" />
                </VisualState.StateTriggers>
                <VisualState.Setters>
                    <Setter Target="DescriptionTextBox.Uid" Value="DescriptionTextBoxShort" /> // Uid of short description

Answer 1

x:Uid is no dependency property on your TextBlock and can't be set at runtime. You can double check this by going to the generated code behind (.g.i.cs file) of your XAML page. To do this, hit F12 on InitializeComponent() in the constructor. Now locate your control in the generated code and start drilling down the object tree: you won't encounter a Uid property. It's a XAML directive backed up by an attribute.

How I typically solve this is having 2 TextBlocks (one collapsed) with the the long and short text and toggle Visibility between both TextBlocks in your VisualStates. Depending on what the parent container of these TextBlocks is, you might need to add a StackPanel or Grid as some parent controls can only have 1 child element.