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WebfactoryPolyglotBundle

A bundle to simplify translations for Doctrine entities.

Its main advantages over similar bundles are:

• Transparency: Add translations to existing entities without any API changes.
• Fast: Entity translations are loaded eagerly from separate translation tables.
• Polyglot: Easy access to all available translations of an entity without additional database requests.

We use it to create multilingual navigation menus and links like "view this article in German", where the linked URL has a locale specific slug.

Installation

Just like any other Symfony bundle, and no additional configuration is required (wheeho!).

Underlying Data Model and How It Works

The assumption is that you already have a "main" Doctrine entity class with some fields that you now need to make locale-specific.

To do so, we'll add a new translation entity class that contains these fields plus a field for the locale. The main entity and the translation entity class will be connected with a OneToMany association.

So, for one single main entity instance, there are zero to many translation entity instances – one for every locale that you have a translation for.

This approach reflects our experience that almost always the relevant content (field values) are maintained for a "primary" locale. This is the "authoritative" version of your content/data. Then, this content is translated for one or several "secondary" locales. The translation entity class is concerned with holding this translated data only.

Technically, this bundle sets up a Doctrine event handler (\Webfactory\Bundle\PolyglotBundle\Doctrine\PolyglotListener) to be notified whenever a Doctrine entity is hydrated, that is, re-created as a PHP object based on database values.

This listener finds all fields in the entity that are marked as being locale-specific and replaces their value with a value holder object. These value holders are instances of \Webfactory\Bundle\PolyglotBundle\TranslatableInterface. To learn more about the Value Holder pattern, see Lazy Load in PoEAA.

You can then use this interface's translate() method to obtain the field value for a locale of your choice: The value holder will take care of returning either the original value present in your main entity or finding the right translation entity instance (for the matching locale) and take the field value from there, depending on whether you requested the primary or one of the additional locales. If no matching translation is found, the primary locale's data will be used.

While this approach should work for any type of data, including objects, in your locale-dependent fields, it works particularly well for strings: The value holder features a __toString() method that will return the value for the currently active locale whenever the value holder object is used in a string context.

Yet, it is worth noting that you're now dealing with the value holders in places where you previously had "your" data or objects. They are not "almost" transparent proxies as those used by Doctrine because they do not provide the same interface as the original values. Only for strings, the difference is sufficiently small.

The good news for Twig users is that __toString() support in Twig is good enough so that you need not care about the distinction of strings and translation value holders. So, Twig constructs like {{ someObject.field }} or {% if someObject.field is not empty %}... will work the same regardless of your getField() method returns a string value or the translation value holder.

You think an example could help clearing up the confusion? Read on!

Usage Example

Let's say you have an existing Doctrine entity Document that looks like this:

Now, we want to make the text field translatable.

Step 1) Update the Main Entity

1. For the main entity class, add the Webfactory\Bundle\PolyglotBundle\Attribute\Locale attribute to indicate your primary locale. That's the locale you have used for your fields so far.
2. Add the Webfactory\Bundle\PolyglotBundle\Attribute\Translatable attribute to all translatable fields.
3. Add the collection to hold translation instances (more about that in the next section), and add the Webfactory\Bundle\PolyglotBundle\Attribute\TranslationCollection attribute to its field. Also make sure it is initialized with an empty Doctrine collection.
4. Change the type hints for the translated fields in the main entity class from string to TranslatableInterface, and use the special translatable_string Doctrine column type for it.

The translatable_string column type behaves like the built-in string type, but allows for type hinting with TranslatableInterface. If you want it to behave like the text type instead, add the use_text_column option like so: #[ORM\Column(type: "translatable_string", options: ["use_text_column" => true])].

This will lead you to something like the following, with some code skipped for brevity:

Step 2) Create the Translation Entity

1. Create a class for the translation entity. As for the name, we suggest suffixing your main entity's name with Translation. It has to contain fields for all the fields in your main entity that are to be translated. Declare these fields as regular Doctrine ORM column, using plain column types like text (e.g. #[ORM\Column(type: "text")]). You may want to extend \Webfactory\Bundle\PolyglotBundle\Entity\BaseTranslation to save yourself some boilerplate code, but extending this class is not necessary.
2. To implement the one-to-many relationship, the translation entity needs to reference to the original entity. In the following example, this is the $entity field.

Your code should look similar to this:

Step 3) Update your database schema

Use Doctrine to update your database schema, e.g. via the DoctrineMigrationsBundle.

That's it!

Your entities will now be automatically loaded in the language corresponding to the current request's locale. If there is no translation for the current locale, the primary locale is used as a fallback.

You probably noticed that we changed the getText() getter in our Document class above to call the translate() method. This uses the value holder to obtain the underlying value, effectively returning the same type of data as before the change. Clients calling this method will not notice a difference, but can only obtain the value for the currently active locale.

Of course, you could also change the method to something along the lines of

... which should be backwards-compatible as well, but allows client code to access the values for locales of their choice.

Your last option would be to leave the getter unchanged, return the value holder object and have your client code deal with it. This is not a 100% backwards-compatible solution, but as stated above, chances are you might get away with it when changing string-typed fields only. The benefit of this approach would be that you can still choose the locale further down the line.

Caveat: Note some subtle changes in case you're trying this approach:

Translations for Doctrine column types other than string

In fact, the fields that are used to hold translated values need not use the translatable Doctrine column type declaration and can be of other type than string.

In this case, you need to use a union type for your field type declaration as in the following example.

With this declaration, the field can serve a dual use: Right before the ORM flushes data, the field value will be switched to the value of the "primary" locale, so that the ORM can persist that data as usual. Similarly, after the ORM has loaded the entity, it will replace the field value with the translation value holder (an instance of TranslatableInterface) that you can use to obtain the translated values as well.

Note that it is not necessary to do this in the translations class (DocumentTranslation in the above examples), since that class represents the values of a single locale only and never contains TranslatableInterface instances.

Credits, Copyright and License

This Bundle was written by webfactory GmbH, Bonn, Germany. We're a software development agency with a focus on PHP (mostly Symfony). If you're a developer looking for new challenges, we'd like to hear from you!

• https://www.webfactory.de
• https://twitter.com/webfactory

Copyright 2012-2024 webfactory GmbH, Bonn. Code released under the MIT license.