rails-translate-models¶ ↑

Minimal implementation of model translations for Rails 3.x having a translations table for each model, based on translated_attributes.

Add it to your Gemfile:

gem 'rails-translate-models'

All examples provided will be based on an article model with title and body as translated attributes.

Migration

For each model you have to create a table for the translations, you can do it on model migration, for example:

class CreateArticles < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    create_table :articles do |t|
      t.timestamps
    end

    create_table :article_translations do |t|
      t.references :article
      t.string     :language_code
      t.string     :title
      t.text       :body
      t.timestamps
    end

    add_index :article_translations, [:article_id, :language_code], :unique => true
  end
end

Specify translated attributes in model

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_translations :title, :body
end

Self-explained usage given an article with two translations (en / es)

Retrieve data, english as current language:

a = Article.first
a.title
=> "example title"

Change language and you’ll get in spanish

I18n.locale = :es
a.title
=> "título ejemplo"

Or you can also get any other language using in_language_code for each attribute

a.title_in_en
=> "example title"

Note that if the current language doesn’t have a translation it always tries to fallback to default locale (I18n.default_locale) then returns nil if it’s also not available.

To create a new object.

a = Article.new
a.title = "example title"
a.title_in_es = "título ejemplo"
a.save

When translation associated record is destroyed all translations are destroyed as well

All models with ‘has_translations’ have ‘has_many :model_translations’ and ‘default_scope :include => :model_translations’ so you can take advantage of it and make use of some scopes, for example:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_translations :title, :body

  scope :ordered_by_title, :order => 'article_translations.title'
  scope :with_title, lambda { |title| where("article_translations.title = ?", title) }
end

You can also make use of validations, for example:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_translations :title, :body
  validates_presence_of :title
end

Note all models with ‘has_translations’ already have the validations for object_id and language_code and also validate the uniqueness of language code for each object_id.

Here’s a simple example to make a form to edit the example article model in all languages.

form.html.erb

<%= form_for @article do |f| %>
  <% I18n.available_locales.each do |locale| %>
    <%= render "form_translations", {:f => f, :locale => locale } %>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

_form_translations.html.erb partial

<label for='article_title_in_<%= locale %>'>Title</label><br />
<%= f.text_field "title_in_#{locale}".to_sym %>

<label for='article_body_in_<%= locale %>'>Content</label><br />
<%= f.text_area "body_in_#{locale}".to_sym %>

It’s an initial implementation for a work in progress project, it’s just an initial release but does the basic stuff I need. Help is welcome ;)

• translations models generators

• fallback as an option

• complete tests? (now there’s some basic testing with minitest)

Not convinced or need a different approach? Try out:

• has_translations (github.com/dmitry/has_translations)

• translated_attributes (github.com/grosser/translated_attributes)

• rails-translate (github.com/fesplugas/rails-translate)

• globalize2 (github.com/joshmh/globalize2)

If you also need to translate routes check out: github.com/francesc/rails-translate-routes