.NET Currency exponent ISO_4217

Question

Hi guys,

I'm developing something for international use. Wondering if anyone can shed any light on whether the CultureInfo class has support for finding currency exponents for particular countries, or whether I need to feed this data in at the database level.

I can't see any property that represents this at the minute, so if anyone knows definitively if it exists, before I look for it / buy it from ISO.

Currency Exponent is the minor units of the currency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4217 - e.g. UK is "2"

Answer 1

Take a look at this blog post on getting CultureInfo for a region. Basically, Window and .NET know about the user's region but not their currency. A region implies a currency, but a country can have more than currency. For example, a person in Cambodia would more than likely want to enter and use USD than Riel. If possible, when capturing any currency amount in a multi-currency system you should capture the currency ISO code.

If you just want to make a quick guess, you can create a CultureInfo object and use it's NumberDecimalDigits property. The also creates a problem when countries switch currencies. For example, if Belarus joins the EU, then it's currency would change from BYR to EUR. It's currency symbol and exponent will be out of date.

Answer 2

I looked at this question and provided a solution which may or may not meet your needs here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/recipes/MoneyTypeForCLR.aspx#CurrencyType

The short of it: I implemented the ISO spec as a custom type using the spec itself to generate the values. Obviously this would need to be regularly updated in production...