Multiple language routes - is that possible?

Rails
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 M.

–
Bojan M.
Informatika Mihelac, Bojan M. s.p. | www.informatikamihelac.com
→ tools, scripts, tricks from our code lab: http://source.mihelac.org

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 M.

Russell N. wrote:

RSL
/it/citta/158
thanks in advance for answer or opinion,

–
Bojan M.
Informatika Mihelac, Bojan M. s.p. | www.informatikamihelac.com
→ tools, scripts, tricks from our code lab: http://source.mihelac.org

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