How to use Yii with a multilingual database model?

Question

I’m having a problem getting the data from my database which I created to be completely multilingual, and I hope someone here can help me.

I’ve split up all my tables in

Answer 1

I am also looking for a generic solution to implement i18n into Yii models. Recently I chose a very similar database schema for a project like you. The only difference is, that I am not using a separate language table, I store the language information in the i18n table.

The following solution is without a custom SQL statement, but I think this could be implemented with relation params, anyway, if you're working with foreign key in your database (eg. MySQL InnoDB) gii will create relations between your base_material and base_material_i18n table, like

class BaseMaterial extends CActiveRecord

public function relations()
{
    return array(
        'baseMaterialI18ns' => array(self::HAS_MANY, 'base_material_i18n', 'id'),
    );
}



class BaseMaterialI18n extends CActiveRecord

public function relations()
{
    return array(
        'baseMaterial' => array(self::BELONGS_TO, 'base_material', 'id'),
    );
}

Now you'd be able to access your translations by using the object notation for relations.

$model = BaseMaterial::model()->with('baseMaterialI18ns')->findByPk(1);
foreach($model->baseMaterialI18ns AS $translation) {
  if ($translation->language != "the language I need") continue:
  // do something with translation data ...
}

I thought about creating a behavior or base class for those models which would act a as helper for managing the translations - pseudo code:

I18nActiveRecord extends CActiveRecord

protected $_attributesI18n;

// populate _attributesI18n on query ...

public function __get($name) {
  if(isset($this->_attributesI18n['language_I_need'][$name]))
    return $this->_attributesI18n[$name];
  else if(isset($this->_attributesI18n['fallback_language'][$name]))
    return $this->_attributesI18n[$name];
  else 
    parent::__get();
}

CActiveRecord __get() source

There is more work to be done to find the needed i18n record, also you could further limit the with() option to improve performance and reduce parsing on the PHP side.

But there may be different use cases how to determine the value, e.g. all translations, translation or fallback, no fallback (empty value). Scenarios could be helpful here.

PS: I would be up for a github project!