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.