Multiple language routes - is that possible?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello all, does anyone have experience with routing in multi language applications - I would like to create routes preserving meaning in original language in URL. Something like these: /en/cities/158 /it/citta/158

Writing one route for every controller and language is not desired as these can mean handling hundreds of routes. It also creates problem with named routes.

Also, when is controller loaded and executed - can app influence on that apart from defining routes? Would it be possible to load some generic controller which will load some specific controller?

thanks in advance for answer or opinion, Bojan Mihelac

2

I had an idea about this that might help you. Hopefully. Presuming you’re serving up a finite set of languages, perhaps something like

map.city “/:lang/:city_var/:id”, :controller => X, :action => Y, :city_var => /cities|citta|ciudades/

I don’t know you could enforce a matchup between, say, “en” and “cities” or “it” and “citta” but it might be doable. If that’s not an issue then I’d think this would work okay. Anyone see problems with it?

RSL

3

I am currently using this aproach but it is not elegant because:

- en/ciudades url and all other combinations would exist, which is minor problem and

- generating url's with that kind of route is problematic, for example city_url(:lang => 'it', :id => 122) would yield nothing as :city_var is not set, and on the other side to set proper :city_var in view I need to know exact translation which means having some translation table, probably in database... and that mean that it would be better to make routes.rb look in the database and create routes dynamically, i am moving in circle here...

best regards, Bojan Mihelac

Russell Norris wrote:

4

> does anyone have experience with routing in multi language > applications - I would like to create routes preserving meaning in > original language in URL. Something like these: > /en/cities/158 > /it/citta/158

  The HTTP standard was specifically written with the concept of "alternatives" in mind, outside of the URL. In particualr, web browsers are suppsoed to send an "Accept-Language" header which explains what language the end user is most familiar with.

  This can be problematic for people who are browsing on someone else's machine, etc, so there should also be some sort of mechanism for the end user to set their language - I'd suggest setting a cookie - but the "Accept-Language" header should be used to determine the default language if the user has not yet selected one.

  There appears to be a "Globalize" plugin for ruby on rails that handles a lot of this:

  http://wiki.globalize-rails.org/globalize/

  I haven't used it (yet), so I don't know how well it works, but browsing through the examples, etc, it looks like a lot of thought has gone into it!

  - Tyler