Using Rails’ New I18n Support in Real Life: Part the Second

December 12th, 2008 By: Daniel

A few more thoughts on handling I18n for real projects.

Images

The way I handled images was pretty simple. Just added this application_helper:

  # Translated image tag
  def timage_tag(source, options = {})
    image_tag("#{I18n.locale}/#{source}", options)
  end

Then I created a directory in public/images for each of the supported locales (e.g. public/images/en-US), put all the images with text in there and I was good to go.

---

Pagination

Pagination was handled similarly with a helper to wrap the call to mislav’s will_paginate gem:

  # Translated will_paginate
  def twill_paginate(collection = nil, options = {})
    will_paginate collection, {:previous_label => t('constants.will_paginate.previous'), :next_label => t('constants.will_paginate.next')}.merge(options)
  end

# config/locales/en-US.yml
en-US:
  constants:
    will_paginate:
      previous: "« Previous"
      next: "Next »"

---

activerecord

Oh and another thing that really helped was using the human_name stuff built in to activerecord. So, for example, everywhere I found an “Agent” in the text instead of an explicit call to translate I could just doAgent.human_name. And for each of Agent’s attributes I could do Agent.human_attribute_name(’name’). And that even works when it’s not a real attribute, but just one of Agent’s public methods (or anything else for that matter). Plus it’ll work for your form labels too, once you install the i18n label plugin. (One caveat though: label User, :username won’t work. It has to be a form_for(@user) do |f| and then yourf.label :username will show the human_attribute_name).

#config/locales/en-US.yml
en-US:
  activerecord:
    models:
      agent: "Agent"
    attributes:
      agent:
        name: "Name"
        some_calculated_value: "Some Calculated Value"

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 10:36 am and is filed under Ruby on Rails.

1. Moki Systems Blog » Using Rails’ New I18n Support in Real Life: Part the FirstSays:
   December 12th, 2008 at 10:36 am
   [...] Interesting Google Technique Using Rails’ New I18n Support in Real Life: Part the Second [...]
2. Peter Says:
   December 20th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
   Thanks a lot for this!
   For me the following code worked (the previous_label wasn’t working …):
   def t_will_paginate(collection = nil, options = {})
   will_paginate collection, {:prev_label => t(’constants.will_paginate.previous’),
   :next_label => t(’constants.will_paginate.next’)}.merge(options)
   end
3. gemini Says:
   January 31st, 2009 at 1:29 am
   my project requires a very odd situation.
   how can i put the next button at the left side?
   and also, how can i put square brackets before the first link and after the last link which the user can not click.
   eg. the page should look like this
   Next> [ 1 2 3 4 5 ]
   thanks in advance
4. Daniel Says:
   February 4th, 2009 at 9:54 am
   @gemini Sounds like you need to customize the will_paginate helpers.
   http://thewebfellas.com/blog/2008/8/3/roll-your-own-pagination-links-with-will_paginate