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Tile and toast notification support for language, scale, and high contrast

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Note

Lives Tiles are a Windows 10 feature that is not supported on later versions of Windows. For new apps, we recommend that you follow the current guidance for App icons.

Your tiles and toasts can load strings and images tailored for display language, display scale factor, high contrast, and other runtime contexts. For background on how to use qualifiers in the names of your resource files, see Tailor your resources for language, scale, and other qualifiers and App icons.

For more info about the value proposition of localizing your app, see Globalization and localization.

Refer to a string resource from a template

In your tile or toast template, you can refer to a string resource using the ms-resource URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) scheme followed by a simple string resource identifier. For example, if you have a Resources.resx file that contains a resource entry whose name is "Farewell", then you have a string resource with the identifier "Farewell". For more info on string resource identifiers and Resources Files (.resw), see Localize strings in your UI and app package manifest.

This is how a reference to the "Farewell" string resource identifier would look in the text body of your template content, using ms-resource.

<text id="1">ms-resource:Farewell</text>

If you omit the ms-resource URI scheme, then the text body is just a string literal, and not a reference to an identifier.

<text id="1">Farewell</text>

Refer to an image resource from a template

In your tile or toast template, you can refer to an image resource using the ms-appx URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) scheme followed by the name of the image resource. This is the same way that you refer to an image resource in XAML markup (for more details, see Reference an image or other asset from XAML markup and code).

For example, you might name folders like this.

\Assets\Images\contrast-standard\welcome.png
\Assets\Images\contrast-high\welcome.png

In that case, you have a single image resource and its name (as an absolute path) is /Assets/Images/welcome.png. Here’s how you use that name in your template.

<image id="1" src="ms-appx:///Assets/Images/welcome.png"/>

Notice how in this example URI the scheme ("ms-appx") is followed by "://" which is followed by an absolute path (an absolute path begins with "/").

Hosting and loading images in the cloud

The ms-resource and ms-appx URI schemes perform automatic qualifier matching to find the resource that's most appropriate for the current context. Web URI schemes (for example, http, https, and ftp) do not perform any such automatic matching.

Instead, append onto your image's URI a query string describing the requested qualifier value or values.

<image id="1" src="http://www.contoso.com/Assets/Images/welcome.png?ms-lang=en-US"/>

Then, in the app service that provides your images, implement an HTTP handler that inspects and uses the query string to determine which image to return.

You also need to set the addImageQuery attribute to true in the tile or toast notification XML payload. The addImageQuery attribute appears in the visual, binding, and image elements of both the tile and toast schemas. Explicitly setting addImageQuery on an element overrides any value set on an ancestor. For instance, an addImageQuery value of true in an image element overrides an addImageQuery of false in its parent binding element.

These are the query strings you can use.

Qualifier Query string Example
Scale ms-scale ?ms-scale=400
Language ms-lang ?ms-lang=en-US
Contrast ms-contrast ?ms-contrast=high

For a reference table of all the possible qualifier values that you can use in your query strings, see ResourceContext.QualifierValues.

Important APIs