Rails: store translations in database

Question

I was searching for a plugin/gem solution to extend the native rails i18n for storing my translations into my database. Maybe I used the wrong search terms, but all I found was the information, that changing the backend IS actually possible and this blog entry which descripes how to write my own backend.

It's hard to imagine, that all those rails apps out there having their translations stored in yml-files or every developer wrote own backends!

Do you know working solutions for this? Storing multiline texts in yml really gets me down! ;)

Thanks and greets,

Joe

Answer 1

i18n has built-in support for using the database as a translation backend.

Create a table using this code in a migration:

   create_table :translations do |t|
     t.string :locale
     t.string :key
     t.text   :value
     t.text   :interpolations
     t.boolean :is_proc, :default => false
   end

Then add an initializer in config/initializers/i18n.rb with contents:

   I18n.backend = I18n::Backend::ActiveRecord.new

And last... put translations in the table. Something like:

locale key      value
en     Cool     Cool
es     Cool     Frio
en     nav.Home home
es     nav.Home casa
...

As of i18n 0.5.0 I believe they moved this code out into it's own gem... I forget what that gem is called.

Answer 2

I finally found what I was looking for with the help of Sven Fuchs:

http://github.com/dylanz/i18n_backend_database/tree/master

This quite awesome plugin by Dylan Stamat does exactly what the name indicates and additionally handles the caching!

Sven also mentioned, that the current branch of i18n/active_record provides an ActiveRecord backend as well:

http://github.com/svenfuchs/i18n/blob/active_record/lib/i18n/backend/active_record.rb

Some discussion about this topic is going on in the goolge i18n user group:

http://groups.google.com/group/rails-i18n/browse_thread/thread/6b7ba3c401890a7e

Issue solved, thanks to Mr I18n Sven Fuchs! ;)

Answer 3

You might want to try http://github.com/joshmh/globalize2/tree/master

Answer 4

We had a good experience with fast_gettext

it has a DB-backed backend that comes with a controller to do the translations over the web. The caching is built-in, though we had to code pre-loading of all of the translations on boot (it is much faster then get them one-by-one with caching).