TranslatableFields

This is a pretty stupid Rails plugin used to ease out i18n of DB fields. I only made a plugin out of this code because I'm using it in two simple applications.

The plugin make it possible to have fields in some of your tables with versions in several different languages. It does not deal with internatialization of the user interface; it complements well i18n plugins which only deal with UI, though (such as Globalite).

This plugin supposes that for each translated attribute, you have a field for each language in your model table, with the language specified as a suffix. For exemple, a "Post" model with fields "title" and "body" translated in English and French should provides in the table "posts" the fields "title_en", "title_fr", "body_en", "body_fr". Obviously this require DB structure updates every time you want to add a new language, so that's not scalable for an unspecified quantity of languages; not a solution for every situation, but that works with applications with 2 or 3 languages.

Example

In your models:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base translatable_fields :title, :abstract, :body end

In your DB, fields "title_en", "title_fr", "abstract_en", "abstract_fr", "body_en", "body_fr".

In a before_filter in ApplicationController:

ActiveRecord::TranslatableFields.current_language = currently_used_locale # where currently_used_locale is e.g. "en" or "fr". # Usually specified somewhere in your session or DB (if set as user preference).

Everywhere else:

Post.find(:first).title # returns the english or french version of the title (depending on what's the currently set language).

Copyright (c) 2008 Nicolas Jacobeus, released under the MIT license