I’m having a problem getting the data from my database which I created to be completely multilingual, and I hope someone here can help me.
I’ve split up all my tables in 2 parts; the “universal” table (does not contain any text that needs to be translated) and the table which contains all the fields that need to be translated with their translations.
Example tables:
base_material
id
picture
base_material_i18n
base_material_id
localization_id
name
description
review_status
review_notes
localization
id
language_name
Query to get the translations (using English (en) as a fall-back language if there is no translation available):
SELECT o.id
, o.type
, o.code
, o.position
, ifnull(t.name,d.name) name
, ifnull(t.description,d.description) description
FROM base_material o
INNER JOIN base_material_i18n d
ON ( o.id=d.base_material_id)
LEFT OUTER JOIN base_material_i18n t
ON ( d.base_material_id=t.base_material_id AND t.localization_id='nl' )
WHERE d.localization_id='en'
My question is how I can automatically get those translations (with the fall-back language as in this query) attached to my model in Yii when I’m searching for the base_material objects? (This is only 1 example table, but almost all my tables (20+) are built in this way, so if possible I would be needing something flexible)
An example of an existing system using what I would need is Propel: http://propel.posterous.com/propel-gets-i18n-behavior-and-why-it-matters
Any ideas how to go about doing that? I’ve checked the existing Yii extensions regarding multilingual sites (like Multilingual Active Record), but they all use a different database design (general information+fall-back language in the main table, translations in the i18n table), and I’m not sure how to change those extensions to use my kind of DB model.
If someone knows of a way to change that existing extension so it can use my kind of DB scheme, then that would be absolutely brilliant and probably the best way to do this.
Edit: I've added a bounty because I still can't find anything on how to let Propel work with Yii (there does exist an extension for Doctrine, but Doctrine doesn't support this kind of DB model with translations either), nor any more information as to how to deal with this using an existing Yii extension or with scopes.
Edit: 98 times viewed but only 3 upvotes and 1 comment. I can't help feeling like I'm doing something wrong here, be it in my question or application/database design; either that or my problem is just very unique (which would surprise me, as I don't think my multilingual database design is that absurd ;-). So, if anyone knows of a better all-round solution for multilingual sites with Yii and/or Propel (apart from the current extensions which I really don't like due to the duplication of text fields) or something similar, please let me know as well.
Thanks in advance!
Have you tried http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/i18n-columns/ (based on http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/stranslateablebehavior/)?
It is an alternate, simpler, approach by adding new table fields in the style of {field}_{language code}, and then setting the translated field in the original model to the current language's translation on afterFind.
In essence, it will get you up and running with translatable fields with the translated content being fetched "automatically", for good and bad :). Adding and removing languages (=columns) is done using migrations.
I am also looking for a generic solution to implement i18n into Yii models.
Recently I chose a very similar database schema for a project like you.
The only difference is, that I am not using a separate language table, I store the language information in the i18n table.
The following solution is without a custom SQL statement, but I think this could be implemented with relation params, anyway, if you're working with foreign key in your database (eg. MySQL InnoDB) gii will create relations between your base_material and base_material_i18n table, like
class BaseMaterial extends CActiveRecord
public function relations()
{
return array(
'baseMaterialI18ns' => array(self::HAS_MANY, 'base_material_i18n', 'id'),
);
}
class BaseMaterialI18n extends CActiveRecord
public function relations()
{
return array(
'baseMaterial' => array(self::BELONGS_TO, 'base_material', 'id'),
);
}
Now you'd be able to access your translations by using the object notation for relations.
$model = BaseMaterial::model()->with('baseMaterialI18ns')->findByPk(1);
foreach($model->baseMaterialI18ns AS $translation) {
if ($translation->language != "the language I need") continue:
// do something with translation data ...
}
I thought about creating a behavior or base class for those models which would act a as helper for managing the translations - pseudo code:
I18nActiveRecord extends CActiveRecord
protected $_attributesI18n;
// populate _attributesI18n on query ...
public function __get($name) {
if(isset($this->_attributesI18n['language_I_need'][$name]))
return $this->_attributesI18n[$name];
else if(isset($this->_attributesI18n['fallback_language'][$name]))
return $this->_attributesI18n[$name];
else
parent::__get();
}
CActiveRecord __get() source
There is more work to be done to find the needed i18n record, also you could further limit the with() option to improve performance and reduce parsing on the PHP side.
But there may be different use cases how to determine the value, e.g. all translations, translation or fallback, no fallback (empty value).
Scenarios could be helpful here.
PS: I would be up for a github project!
You can try to use a simple multilingual CRUD extension.
it is very simple to use and modificate. you just need to add language field to your table.
just watch description here: http://all-of.me/yii-multilingual-crud/
it is in alpha state, but tried on a few projects. you can easily modificate it or contact author to fix or add features
Related
I am looking to create a feature whereby a User can download any available documents related to the item from a tab on the PDP.
So far I have created a custom record called Documentation (customrecord_documentation) containing the following fields:
Related item : custrecord_documentation_related_item
Type : custrecord_documentation_type
Document : custrecord_documentation_document
Description : custrecord_documentation_description
Related Item ID : custrecord_documentation_related_item_id
The functionality works fine on the backend of NetSuite where I can assign documents to an Inventory item. The stumbling block is trying to fetch the data to the front end of the SCA webstore.
Any help on the above would be much appreciated.
I've come at this a number of ways.
One way is to create a Suitelet that returns JSON of the document names and urls. The urls can be the real Netsuite urls or they can be the urls of your suitelet where you set up the suitelet to return the doc when accessed with action=doc&id=_docid_ query params.
Add a target <div id="relatedDocs"></div> to the item_details.tpl
In your ItemDetailsView's init_Plugins add
$.getJSON('app/site/hosting/scriptlet.nl...?action=availabledoc').
then(function(data){
var asHtml = format(data); //however you like
$("#relatedDocs").html(asHtml);
});
You can also go the whole module route. If you created a third party module DocsView then you would add DocsView as a child view to ItemDetailsView.
That's a little more involved so try the option above first to see if it fits your needs. The nice thing is you can just about ignore Backbone with this approach. You can make this a little more portable by using a service.ss instead of the suitelet. You can create your own ssp app for the function so you don't have to deal with SCAs url structure.
It's been a while, but you should be able to access the JSON data from within the related Backbone View class. From there, within the return context, output the value you're wanting to the PDP. Hopefully you're extending the original class and not overwriting / altering the core code :P.
The model associated with the PDP should hold all the JSON data you're looking for. Model.get('...') sort of syntax.
I'd recommend against Suitelets for this, as that's extra execution time, and is a bit slower.
I'm sure you know, but you need to set the documents to be available as public as well.
Hope this helps, thanks.
I am working on a CakePHP3 application that will be used to display information about which products our suppliers are currently offering.
** Different Vendors provide their product lists in different ways, CSV, JSON, or by way of a web scrape **
I have 2 models that I have created:
Vendors - This references a specific Vendor that we use.
VendorProducts - This references all the products that all of our vendors offer.
I would like to be able to call something like:
$vendor->getAvailableProducts()
and have it either get the CSV and parse it, grab the JSON, or scrape the suppliers website and use this to populate the VendorProducts table in the database with products from this supplier.
I understand the idea behind Fat Models and Skinny Controllers, however I'm having a bit of difficulty implementing this feature.
I would like to provide the following functionality.
The Vendor's getAvailableProducts() function can be called via the web interface AND/OR a cakephp shell script that could be run in a cron job.
As some functionality (like scraping the website) takes a considerable amount of time, I would like to be able to see the progress of this function in the view,
eg: X/Y Products Updated from {Supplier}.
This can be broken down into the following questions:
1. Which file should my "getAvailableProducts()" function go in?
2. As each $vendor has a unique updateProducts() function, how would the correct function be called from $vendor->getAvailableProducts()
// something like this?
public function getAvailableProducts() {
if($vendor->name == "SupplierA") {
getProductsFromSupplierA();
}
if($vendor->name == "SupplierB") {
getProductsFromSupplierB();
}
..., etc.
}
3. How can the progress of this function be returned to a View?
Don't use table classes for that create a new namespace within the model layer or in the app itself:
src/Vendor
src/Model/Vendor
Have a factory that constructs and returns you the Vendor classes:
$vendorA = VendorFactory::get('SupplierA');
$vendorB = VendorFactory::get('SupplierB');
Each vendor class must implement a method fetchProducts(), use an interface or an abstract base class for that.
The method should return a normalized array that can be used to turn the products in entities:
$this->newEntities(VendorFactory::get('SupplierA')->fetchProducts());
You'll have a hard time determining the progress if there is no way to know the total amount of records. Which is likely when you scrape the website. Same issue applies when the API doesn't tell you the total amount of records per JSON data set. If you're able to get that total count somehow you can do this:
$this->newEntities(VendorFactory::get('SupplierA')->fetchProducts([
'limit' => 50,
'offset' => 0
]);
And implement pagination for the vendor which you can then use to run over all the records in a while() loop in chunks of X records. If you trigger that via shell you can create a "job" for that and update the progress after each chunk. There are multiple existing solutions for this kind of task already out there. Finally use Comet or Websockets to get the status updated on your website. Or the old way: Trigger an AJAX request every X seconds to check the status.
There is a lot more that could be said, but this is actually already a very broad question, there is very likely not enough detail to cover all cases. Also it might be possible (I'm pretty sure) there are different ways to solve this.
Here is the issue I am facing all the time since I started to learn CakePHP 3
What is this concept of entity a real world example would help alot.
public function add()
{
// why do we have to create new entity / what is the role of entity here.
$comment = $this->Comments->newEntity();
if ($this->request->is('post','put')) {
// why do we have to use this line after posting / what is the role of this line.
$comment = $this->Comments->patchEntity($comment,$this->request->data);
if ($this->Comments->save($comment)) {
$this->Flash->success('comment submitted successfully.');
} else {
$this->Flash->error('Sorry, comment could not be updated.');
}
}
return $this->redirect($this->referer());
}
Let me open the book for you:
While Table Objects represent and provide access to a collection of
objects, entities represent individual rows or domain objects in your
application. Entities contain persistent properties and methods to
manipulate and access the data they contain.
-
why do we have to create new entity / what is the role of entity here.
Almost everything, if not all, in Cake3 works with entities, what an entity is is explained above. You need to create a new entity so that the FormHelper can work with it, AFAIR it can still work with an array if configured to do so as well but the entity should be used.
The reason entities exist is to abstract the data. Some people think entities are the representation of a DB row - that's wrong. As the book says, they can be a row but don't have to represent a row because the 3.0 ORM can work with other resources as well. In theory you can have a CSV data source that returns an entity per line.
I suggest you to read the entity code in the CakePHP core to get a deeper understanding of what else entities provide, just saying they're "just" a set of properties is to short thought.
why do we have to use this line after posting / what is the role of this line.
The post data is merged into the previously created entity, that's it. Use the API if you have basic questions like that. See the API entry for patchEntity().
In simple word, Entity is a set of one record of table and their relational table, on that you can perform operation without touch of database and encapsulate property of entity (fields of table) as you want.
Advantages of Entity.
Modifying result sets outside of the database (for formatting or otherwise)
Needing to represent both the table and row in the same class.
Data validation was a fucking nightmare.
Inconsistent API in terms of both how we handled things internally as well as what (and how) we returned stuff.
Other random stuff as you want.
You can do run-time modification of result sets. Just add a method to your entity to return results in the way you want. This also means you can use composition for managing entities (yaya traits)
Validation is beautiful. We can validate data before it gets into an object and then validate the object state in a separate step.
It is easier for developers to understand what they are dealing with. You either have an object or an array of objects. An object can be linked to data which can also include other objects, but you no longer have to guess at what the array key will be, nor whether its nested funkily.
We can iterate on the interface for tables and entities separately. We couldn't easily change internals for the old Model class because of the implications on both, whereas now we can (in theory) change one without mucking about in the other.
It looks prettier simple.
Try this:
if ($this->request->is('post','put')) {
$data = $this->request->getData();
$comment = $this->Comments->newEntity();
$comment = $this->Comments->patchEntity($comment, $data);
$status = $this->Comments->save($comment);
if ($status) {
$this->Flash->success('comment submitted successfully.');
} else {
$this->Flash->error('Sorry, comment could not be updated.');
}
}
return $this->redirect($this->referer());
}
My advice is never use Post and Put in the same function. Just for good pratice. Put works fine when you make a update using id like a parameter.
Something came up at work today and I'm not sure how you would go about it. Essentially, we have an application that is making use of NHibernate. Currently, we are using Fluent NHibernate and exporting the schema directly from the domain using ExportSchema. The column names are in English.
During some discussions today, it came out that as well as internationalizing the data there is an idea of getting the column names to be also in the language of the install.
So for example, if the database was deployed to an English speaking country the column names would be in English and if it was deployed to a francophone country the column names would be in French.
The theory seemed to be such that if a user wanted to write queries against the datastore they would be able to query using column names based in their native language. (assume they are named descriptively).
I can't say that I have come across this before and I am intrigued how you would go about it? Also, even though I mention NHibernate if there are other options please feel free to mention them.
Thanks
You could use resource files for each languauge you want to support and in your fluent mappings refer to these resources rather than hard coded strings. So an example mapping would looking something like this:
public OrderMap()
{
CultureInfo culture = CultureInfo.CurrentCulture;
ResourceManager rm = new ResourceManager("HelloWorldGlobed.myRes",typeof(OrderMap).Assembly);
DynamicUpdate();
Table(rm.GetString("ORDER_TABLE_NAME",culture));
Id(x => x.Id, rm.GetString("ORDER_ID",culture));
Map(x => x.Name, rm.GetString("ORDER_NAME",culture));
}
The above is just a simple example and I have not tested this but this gives you an idea of how you would do this using resources. You would probably want to consolidate the retriaval of the CultureInfo object and the ResourceManager object in a static class or something.
Here is also an example of using resources in C#:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5208/MultiLanguage-Applications
I am trying to extend the functionality of the comments in a WordPress install. I read allusion to an elusive 'custom comment type' functionality, but could not find any information. Instead, I was thinking that I would add a custom column ' to the 'comments' database table. That's the easy part. What I have no clue how to do is to customize the comments queries for saving, updating and reading the comments to reflect the existence of the new table column. I thought there would be a filter to alter the query, but I cannot find any that would do it... Any ideas?
There isn't really a custom comment type but you can easily and effectively add columns using "comment meta" which is a table of name/value pairs associated where each name/value pair is associated with a given comment using a 'meta_key' (please don't add a column to the SQL database; that's frowned upon in the WordPress developer community.)
Let's assume you wanted to let the user add their Twitter account. This is the code that would save my Twitter account to the comment identified by $comment_ID (prefixing the meta key name with an underscore is a good idea for any meta that you maintain via custom code vs that you let users select the meta key):
update_comment_meta($comment_ID,'_twitter','mikeschinkel');
Then to load the value to display in your template you just call get_comment_meta() (the third parameter means to return a single value, not an array of values):
$twitter = get_comment_meta($comment_ID,'_twitter',true);
Of course without knowing how to hook WordPress to integrate this the above functions would not be a lot of help. There are two hooks you'll need to use, the first being wp_insert_comment which will get called when WordPress saves a comment:
add_action('wp_insert_comment','yoursite_wp_insert_comment',10,2);
function yoursite_wp_insert_comment($comment_ID,$commmentdata) {
$twitter = isset($_GET['twitter']) ? $_GET['twitter'] : false;
update_comment_meta($comment_ID,'_twitter',$twitter);
}
The second one is a bit more complicated; the one that lets you add fields and modify other aspects of the comment form. The 'comment_form_defaults' hook sets the defaults for the comment and let's you add the HTML for a Twitter field (I snagged the format for the HTML from the comment_form() function found in /wp-includes/comment-template.php on line 1511 in WP v3.0.1)
add_filter('comment_form_defaults','yoursite_comment_form_defaults');
function yoursite_comment_form_defaults($defaults) {
$email = $defaults['fields']['email'];
$label = __( 'Twitter' );
$value = isset($_GET['twitter']) ? $_GET['twitter'] : false;
$defaults['fields']['twitter'] =<<<HTML
<p class="comment-form-twitter">
<label for="twitter">{$label}</label>
<input id="twitter" name="twitter" type="text" value="{$value}" size="30" />
</p>
HTML;
return $defaults;
}
And here's what it looks like in action:
This comment form extensibility is new for WordPress 3.0 so by its nature of being new in an open-source project it's probably not going to accommodate all use-cases yet (such as there was no easy way to get a remembered value for the Twitter screen name) but hopefully you'll be able to bend it enough to you will and get what you need and in future released of WordPress the comment form API will almost certainly improve.
Hope this helps.
-Mike
P.S. In future consider posting your question on StackOverflow's sister site WordPress Answers; that's where most of the WordPress enthusiasts hang out, those who can quickly answer questions like this.
I found this useful link related to the topic:
Customizing Comments in WordPress - Functionality and Appearance