Is there any way to map a ISO Currency Code back to a culture string?

Question

We maintain a master data table in SQL that contains the currency code, description, and symbol of all currencies our company does business in. In total there are 32. Example;

USD, US Dollar, $

These codes are used to look up exchange rate information which is automatically inserted into another SQL table. All of our .NET applications support these currencies. A user sets their preferred currency in their profile.

We just recently starting using Telerik controls, and the RadNumericTextBox control takes a culture string as a property (i.e en-US) which handles all culture specific settings (symbol, separator, grouping, etc) which makes monetary input quite nice for a user, but this creates an issue.

Now to the actual issue. I bind a drop down list with a list of objects, and in order to have all required information for the telerik controls and exchange rate information the underlying values need to be in this format. Example;

: --> en-US:USD

Logic that builds the currency objects

 public static List<Currency> BuildCurrencyObjects()
    {
        List<Currency> currencies = new List<Currency>();
        List<Currency> dbCurrencies = CurrencyMgmt.GetCurrencies();

        foreach (Currency currency in dbCurrencies)
        {
            var region = CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.SpecificCultures)
                                    .Select(c => new RegionInfo(c.LCID))
                                    .Where(ri => ri != null && ri.ISOCurrencySymbol == currency.CurrenyCode)
                                    .FirstOrDefault();

            if (region != null)
            {
                var culture = CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.SpecificCultures)
                                         .Where(x => x.Name.EndsWith((region as RegionInfo).Name))
                                         .FirstOrDefault();
                if (culture != null)
                {
                    Currency c = new Currency()
                    {
                        CultureCode = culture.Name + ":" + region.ISOCurrencySymbol,
                        Symbol = culture.NumberFormat.CurrencySymbol,
                        Description = region.CurrencyEnglishName,
                        CurrencyRegion = region.EnglishName,
                        CurrenyCode = region.Name
                    };

                    currencies.Add(c);
                }
            }
        }

        return currencies;
    }

I wrote this function pretty quickly and it appeared to work correctly. It creates 31 currency objects and displayed what appeared to be correct text in the drop down. I only realized there was an issue when it was moved to our test environment where the United States display text went from; and the value;

United States, US Dollar, $ --> Carribean, US Dollar, $ en-US:USD --> en-029:USD

I understand now that the above logic wont work since there are multiple cultures that map back to a currency code and Linq is returning the first element in the sequence. Is there any proficient way to map a currency code back to a culture string?

Answer 1

Short answer: Is not possible. Look what happen with the EURO. You could see a more examples here

Your solution should include a way to store the actual culture along with the currency.