ActiveRecordTranslatable

Make attributes of an ActiveRecord Model translatable, and store the translations in the provided I18n backend. This is really helpful if there already is, a interface to provide ie missing translations for elements in I18n.

Install

Add

gem "activerecord_translatable"

to your gemfile, this should work for rails 3 and above.

Usage

Use inside of the model

class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
  translate :title
end

I18n.locale = :en
mymodel = MyModel.create(title: "My title", title_de: "Mein Title)
mymodel.title_wk = "Woohhaakkk"

mymodel.title # => "My title"
mymodel.title_en # => "My title"
mymodel.title_wk # => "Woohhaakkk"

Prerequisites

To save the locales ActiveRecordTranslatable saves an array of the specified locale, for this to work, the database needs the ability to save arrays. The easiest way to handle this is to use ActiveRecords ability to serialize.

class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
  serialize :locales
  translate :name
end

And add the column as a string

class CreateMyModel < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    create_table :my_model do |t|
      t.string :locales
    end
  end
end

If you are using postgres you can also use the native postgres array

gem 'activerecord-postgres-array'

To add the array to the model the migration looks like this

class CreateMyModel < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    create_table :my_model do |t|
      t.string_array :locales
    end
  end
end

And the model does not need to know anything about this

class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
  translate :name
end

How it works

Translateable saves the translation via I18n.backend.store_translations, this means that the backend has to be able to store new items. So backend needs to be for example the KeyValue or ActiveRecord one. More railscasts.com/episodes/256-i18n-backends

Tests

The tests are using rspec and an im memory sqlite database, so all that is needed is to run

$ rake spec

Current State

This has been extracted form an Rails application so it should be pretty stable by now. Any contributions and fixes are of course highly welcome!