Implement fallbackLocale per field

[Ontopic]

Currently I'm entertaining several options to allow for specifying a field on a "global" level (so for every locale, not an application global), but allow a locale to overwrite the "global" value.

Use-case e.g. would be a site that hosts several languages, all the texts are translated, but there's an external link that usually is the same for every locale, but sometimes will need to be adjusted. I want the external links to use fallbackLocale, but not the text field.

So far I don't think there's a way to specify fallback policy on a field level? More influence on this would be very welcome for multilingual sites. If there's a rough plan you guys have in mind, I'm more than happy to implement it. Otherwise let's discuss how we could approach this.

[DanRibbens]

Hi @Ontopic, if I understand your use case correctly, then you would want to set localized: true at the field level instead of at the block level. Is that the problem, a fallback at the block level is too broad?

Is the problem that your fallback locale has one value but the other locales need to default to something different? In that case I think you'll need to set all the locales to have the URL instead of relying on the fallback for this particular field.

Another thought, depending on your implementation you could put the logic in the frontend by querying with ?fallback-locale=none which will give you null and then you could manage it from a globals field or have it written in to the frontend. Of course that could be a problem if you have other localized fields coming from that collection that would need to have the fallback.

Let me know what you think. We're happy to help figure out best practices and improve Payload where we can.

[Ontopic]

I was thinking in similar directions. Mostly verifying this is not something already on your timeline before I start a redundant pull-request.

I'll post my findings here to work out the best way to go. Thanks for your input!

[Ontopic]

One thing to note that I think may be a bug though is that even when fallbackLocale is set to false in payload.config.js, it still shows the default locale in the List view of a collection on relationship fields that don't have the current locale. Hope that is clear, otherwise I'll open a more detailed report, something for when you guys got time to work out the kinks, not a breaking issue. Just a nuisance to explain to clients in the future.