TranslateableBehavior for Yii2

This behavior has been inspired by the great work of Mikehaertl's Translatable Behavior for Yii 1.*.

It eases the translation of ActiveRecord's attributes as it maps theme from a translation table into the main record. It also automatically loads application language by default.

Sample of use:

<?php

// create a record
$tour = new Tour;

$tour->title = "English title";

// save both the new Tour and a related translation record with the title
$tour->save();


// change language
$tour->language = 'fr';

$tour->title = "French title";

// save translation only
$tour->saveTranslation();

Installation

The preferred way to install this extension is through composer.

Either run

php composer.phar require "2amigos/yii2-translateable-behavior"

or add

"2amigos/yii2-translateable-behavior" : "~1.1"

to the require section of your application's composer.json file.

Usage

Preparation

First you need to move all the attributes that require to be translated into a separated table. For example, imagine we wish to keep translations of title and description from our tour entity. Our schema should result on the following:

    +--------------+        +--------------+        +-------------------+
    |     tour     |        |     tour     |        |      tour_lang    |
    +--------------+        +--------------+        +-------------------+
    |           id |        |           id |        |                id |
    |        title |  --->  |   created_at |   +    |           tour_id |
    |  description |        |   updated_at |        |          language |
    |   created_at |        +--------------+        |             title |
    |   updated_at |                                |       description |
    +--------------+                                +-------------------+

After we have modified our schema, now we need to define a relation in our ActiveRecord object. The following example assumes that we have already created a TourLang model (see the schema above):

/**
* @return \yii\db\ActiveQuery
*/
public function getTranslations()
{
    return $this->hasMany(TourLang::className(), ['tour_id' => 'id']);
}

Finally, we need to attach our behavior.

use dosamigos\translateable\TranslateableBehavior;

\\ ...

public function behaviors()
{
    return [
        'trans' => [ // name it the way you want
            'class' => TranslateableBehavior::className(),
            // in case you named your relation differently, you can setup its relation name attribute
            // 'relation' => 'translations',
            // in case you named the language column differently on your translation schema
            // 'languageField' => 'language',
            'translationAttributes' => [
                'title', 'description'
            ]
        ],
    ];
}

Basic Usage

// create a record
$tour = new Tour;
$tour->title = "English title";

// save both the new Tour and a related translation record with the title
$tour->save();


// change language
$tour->language = 'fr';

$tour->title = "French title";

// save fr translation only
$tour->saveTranslation();

You may also set multiple translations directly:

$tour = new Tour;
$tour->title = [
  'translations' => [
     'en' => "English title",
     'de' => "Deutscher Titel",
  ],
];

// save both the new Tour and a related translation record with the title
$tour->save();

Fallback language

In case no translation is available for a specific language the behavior allows to specify a fallback translation to load instead. By default the fallback will use the application source language. It can be configured by setting the fallbackLanguage property of the behavior.

Fallback language can be configured to be a single language or per language:

// use english as fallback for all languages when no translation is available
'fallbackLanguage' => 'en',
// alternatively:
'fallbackLanguage' => [
    'de' => 'en', // fall back to English if German translation is missing
    'uk' => 'ru', // fall back to Russian if no Ukrainian translation is available
],

Additionally to the configurable fallback a fallback to non-localized language is applied automatically. E.g. if no translation exists for de-AT (German in Austria) the translation will fall back to de. The fallback goes further if de is not found using the fallbackLanguage configuration, so from the example above it will then try en.

When the fallback is defined in array format and no fallback can be found for a language, the first fallback is returned.

You may disable the fallback mechanism by setting fallbackLanguage to false.

If you want to configure fallback languages globally, you can do so by configuring the TranslateableBehavior class in Yii DI container:

Yii::$container->set('dosamigos\translateable\TranslateableBehavior', ['fallbackLanguage' => 'de']);

Deleting translations

By default, when an active record is deleted, translation records are deleted in the afterSave event. However some database scenarios require different configuration, in case foreign keys restrict the deletion of records.

You may configure 'deleteEvent' to be either ActiveRecord::EVENT_BEFORE_DELETE or ActiveRecord::EVENT_AFTER_DELETE to control on which event the deletion of records should be performed. You may set 'deleteEvent' to false to disable deletion and rely on DB foreign key cascade or implement your own method.

When using the Translateablebehavior in an ActiveRecord you should enable transactions() for the delete operation.

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