Maybe this is old hat to some, but I've been doing some research into i18n and come up with what I think is an interesting way to get better integration with internationalization in layout containers.
To recap, Dojo has, and uses internally, an internationalization system which makes sure that the Cancel button button read 'Anulla' if your browser says that your locale is 'it', and so on.
I have been thinking about various ways of making the use of i18n more dynamic. My first stab at this was a small widget, which could be embedded in a page (at any amount of places) which treated its innerHTML as a key string to be looked up in the i18n system and exchanged for the actual message du jour.
This was a rather heavyweight solution (and I also wrongly used dojo.requireLocalization inside the widget, instead of by the dojo.require statements where it should be. It was just insane to do that every time an instance of the widget was created, but that's how I roll :), and was unable to handle translations of html properties, like the title="" inside an anchor element, for example.
I then thought of extending dijit._Templated (the superclass of all Dojo widgets whichuses 'normal templates) to do roughly the same for all all widget templates. But somehow it felt not really spot on for my problem.
What I had, was a number of pages, which I had been translating to a number of hmtl 'snippet' files, which only contained the markup for what they wanted to do - no body, header or stuff like that. They are used inside ContentPanes which are managed in turn by a StackContainer, which simulates page transitions but within preloaded html snippet, getting you a mighty quick site where all parts are already loaded in the browser,but only one shown at a time.
Each of these 'pages' have a lot of text, which should be translated, as well as a number of title="" and related element properties which also should be translated, so having a solution which only worked for widget templates would only solve part of the problem.
SP what Idid was to create a widget which sublassed dijit.ContentPane, and which overrode the function called when the pane is done loading remote content (the file containing the html snippet), onDownloadEnd.
dojo.provide("layout.TranslationPane");
dojo.require("dijit.layout.ContentPane");
dojo.require("dojo.i18n");
dojo.declare("layout.TranslationPane", dijit.layout.ContentPane,
{
onDownloadEnd: function(pane)
{
console.log("layout.TranslationPane callback onDownloadEnd called.");
var html = this._getContentAttr();
var res = dojo.i18n.getLocalization("layout", "salutations");
html = dojo.string.substitute(html, res);
this._isDownloaded = true;
this.setContent(html);
}
});
Not much code? No, that's because I solve my problems a) at the machine they appear, b) in JavaScript, and c) on the shoulders of Dojo. So there.
That leave me with snippet files which contain any number of ${title_of_stuff} anywhere at all, since the 'page' is treated as a string.
I think that this would be a great thing to add to ContentPane permanently, with a couple of extra properties to it, which would point out locale overide and (not optional) the name of the package and translation file to use for any ${keywords} appearing in the markup loaded.
WDYT?
Cheers,
PS