Question Event handlers on LocalizedStringEvent are lost when deactivating a game object

In our UI I have some UI components that are conditionally showing and hiding. On of these is a label that shows a progress information:



This label needs to be dynamically updated at runtime to inject the current progress into it. The label is set up like this:



At runtime I update the format arguments like this:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2.      LocalizeStringEvent progress;
3.  
4. // ...
5.      progress.StringReference.Arguments = new object[]
6.                 {researchItem.spentHours, researchItem.descriptor.requiredHours};
7.  
8.       // force a refresh
9.       progress.StringReference.RefreshString();
10.  

Now for reasons sometimes this label is not to be shown. To hide it, I simply deactivate the game object on which the label (and the

LocalizeStringEvent

) resides. Now if I later activate it again, I get an exception when trying to refresh the string:

Code (CSharp):

1. Exception: RefreshString should be used with StringChanged however no change handler has been registered.
2. UnityEngine.Localization.LocalizedString.RefreshString () (at Library/PackageCache/com.unity.localization@0.8.1-preview/Runtime/Localized Reference/LocalizedString.cs:130)

So it would seem that deactivating the game object somehow removes the event from the

LocalizedString

instance that the

LocalizedStringEvent 

refers to. I dug a bit in the code and I think I have found the cause of this. In

LocalizedStringEvent 

there is code to clear the event handlers when the component is deactivated (starting around line 62):

Code (CSharp):

1.         /// <summary>
2.         /// Stops listening for changes to <see cref="StringReference"/>.
3.         /// </summary>
4.         protected virtual void OnDisable() => ClearChangeHandler();

I'm not exactly sure why it is there, but it breaks use cases where you need to dynamically show and hide UI elements or where you show and hide a complete dialog by disabling the root gameobject (which in turn disables all child game objects). A workaround would be to put the

LocalizedStringEvent 

on a separate game object that is not deactivated but that's rather messy. Am I using this the wrong way?

 

Yes I will do this. Should I use the editor's built-in bug reporting tool or do you have some other location for reporting bugs about the localization tools?

 

I am having exactly the same problem as Kork described. Hope you can fix this soon, I have no interest in developing a custom made localization system because of a bug when this complete solution already exists.

Edit: In case this can help. This exception only occurs to me when I am developing on my slow laptop, not in the faster pc so I guess that the problem might be related to localization string load time being higher than gameobjects's deactivation time.

 

Nevermind. After reading your reply I did some debugging to be certain of what I said and found out that I was calling RefreshString() on an active component of a disabled gameobject. Solved it by checking gameobject' state before doing a refresh.

Sorry and thank you, Karl.

 

I've had the same problem and I was checking also if my Gameobject was active. For me the exception disappeared when I removed the OnEnable() function where I called RefreshString. Now I only call RefreshString() in the method where I update the argument for the smart string. Am I doing everything alright?

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2. using UnityEngine.Localization;
3. using UnityEngine.Localization.Components;
4.  
5. public class Distance : MonoBehaviour
6. {
7.     public int distance;
8.     public LocalizeStringEvent localizeString;
9.  
10.     public void SetDistance(int newDistance)
11.     {
12.         distance = newDistance;
13.         localizeString.StringReference.RefreshString();
14.     }
15. }