28 Nov 2009 | (0) | Category: Internationalization

Quick Tip - Translating Model Variables

While working on a now defunct cms, I was attempting to internationalize model validation messages. 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:

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

And then run the following shell command:

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cake i18n initdb
cake i18n extract

That should somehow generate .pot files, which is where CakePHP will grab translations.

So I did the following to my rules:

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<?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:

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

Not very helpful.

It turns out I forgot to call the parent Model::__construct() function when redefining the constructor. So I did the following:

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<?php
class Category extends AppModel {
   var $name = 'Category';
   function __construct($id = false, $table = null, $ds = null) {
       $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),
      );

      parent::__construct($id, $table, $ds);
  }
}
?>

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!

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