28 Nov 2009 | Category: Internationalization

Quick Tip - Translating Model Variables

In the latest Marcy Avenue commits, I've been working on some internationalization. Well, I've been working on standardizing model validation messages. I've got a pretty good and standardized set of them, so translating those messages into other languages shouldn't be too difficult.

I thought I had a pretty good idea as to how to internationalize those messages. Usually, you do the following to any string in CakePHP:

<?php __('encapsulate string in this convenient function'); ?>

And then run the following shell command:

cake i18n initdb
cake i18n extract

Or something like that. That should somehow generate .pot files, which is where CakePHP will grab translations. I'll write a better guide in the coming weeks, as that is beyond the scope of this post.

Anyways, I did the following to my rules:

<?php
class Category extends AppModel {
    var $name = 'Category';
    function __construct() {
        $this->validate = array(
            'title' => array(
                'notempty' => array(
                    'rule' => array('notempty'),
                    'message' => __('cannot be left empty', true)
                ),
            ),
        );
        $this->visibilities = array(
            'published' => __('Published', true),
            'private' => __('Private', true),
            'password' => __('Password Protected', true),
        );
    }
}
?>

Don't do that! It will break the entire application! The error message will be something like the following (it won't give you a damned idea as to what the hell is happening either, which is annoying lol):

Fatal error: Call to a member function trigger() on a non-object in cake/libs/model/model.php on line 2057

You forgot to call the parent Model::__construct() function, as well as all the parameters that the Model constructor takes. Do the following:

<?php
class Category extends AppModel {
    var $name = 'Category';
    function __construct($id = false, $table = null, $ds = null) {
        parent::__construct($id, $table, $ds);
        $this->validate = array(
            'title' => array(
                'notempty' => array(
                    'rule' => array('notempty'),
                    'message' => __('cannot be left empty', true)
                ),
            ),
        );
        $this->visibilities = array(
            'published' => __('Published', true),
            'private' => __('Private', true),
            'password' => __('Password Protected', true),
        );
    }
}
?>

Note that you do not need to do

var $validate = array();

before the constructor. You can also place any other variables that you would like to translate in the constructor, like I do with my $visibilities variable. Then you'll no longer get that silly trigger() error message. And your app will work again. Hurray! Whoagies unite!

Note: For the record, I'm targeting a French translation of Marcy Avenue first, followed by Spanish, simply so I can practice French.