“Lazy” Lookup Translations
Friday, January 21, 2011
A feature that so many people seem to not know about the I18n API is the ability to lookup translations using a short “dot” syntax.
For example, say we are in a view located at: app/views/books/index/title
The view would look something like this:
<h1><%= t 'books.index.title' %></h1>
<p><%= t 'books.index.intro' %></p>
<ul>
<li><%= t 'books.index.point1' %></li>
<li><%= t 'books.index.point1' %></li>
<li><%= t 'books.index.point1' %></li>
</ul>As you can see, we are repeating books.index quite a bit. Using this syntax will also make refactoring more cumbersome if we decide to move this view to another folder.
Rails provides us with a way to fix this. Under the “Organization of Locale Files” section of the I18n Rails Guide, it describes a “lazy” lookup for translations. Instead of having to put books.index at the start of each translation lookup, we can just use a dot. By using the dot, the view will automatically look at this views position in the application, and use that as the scope. So if you have a file located at: app/views/posts/comments/index the scope for translations of that file will be: posts.comments.index. Pretty cool huh?
Using this new syntax, we can clean up the above view like so:
<h1><%= t '.title' %></h1>
<p><%= t '.intro' %></p>
<ul>
<li><%= t '.point1' %></li>
<li><%= t '.point1' %></li>
<li><%= t '.point1' %></li>
</ul>This is a really nice and DRY way of inserting translations into your application.
