Here is the situation:
- Spring message source
- 2 files: email-subjects.properties and email-subjects_nl.properties
- requested locale: en_US
- email-subjects_en_us.properties
- email-subjects_en.properties
- email-subjects_nl_NL.properties
- email-subjects_nl.properties
- email-subjects.properties
The solution? Well luckily the authors of the code realized this is not always what you want. An easy setFallbackToSystemLocale(false) overrides this funny behavior. I added <property name="fallbackToSystemLocale" value="false" /> to my config file and it all worked. Hurray for Spring!
Update 2008-08-04: adapted the article to the real solution.