Interface Text

Introduction

Cloudrexx is multilingual. All interface text is localized to the user's selected locale. This must be taken into account when developing new extensions to Cloudrexx. Interface text must therefore not be placed hard-coded (in a specific locale) to the view layer. Instead of placing hard-coded text into the view layer, so called text-variables must be used.

Text-Variable

A text-variable refers to a certain element of the global array $_ARRAYLANG.

Scheme

The scheme of a text-variable is as follow:

TXT_<COMPOMENT_NAME>_<SHORT_AND_CONCISE_DESCRIPTION_OF_TEXT>

Whereas <COMPOMENT_NAME> is the name, in uppercase, of the compoment (module) the text-variable is in use (i.e. NEWS, SHOP) and <SHORT_AND_CONCISE_DESCRIPTION_OF_TEXT> should be a short and concise description of the text itself. The text-variable is written in USU-Notation according to the Naming conventions of Contrexx.

Example

$_ARRAYLANG['TXT_NEWS_ADD_MESSAGE'] = "Add new message";

Organization

All text-variables of a certain compoment (module) must be placed in the component' language folder (/lang). I.e. for the News component, all text-variables (interface text) are located in the folder core_modules/News/lang.

Furthermore, the text-variables of the frontend are separated from those of the backend. Text-variables' of the frontend are to be put in the file frontend.php and those of the backend into the file backend.php.

The interface text (files frontend.php / backend.php) of a certain language must then be put into a separate folder in the component' language folder, where the language's ISO 639-1 code is used as the folder's name.

I.e. the English interface text of the News component is located in core_modules/News/lang/en/.

The content of a component' language folder would in general look like the following:

lang
├── de
│   ├── backend.php
│   └── frontend.php
├── dk
│   ├── backend.php
│   └── frontend.php
├── en
│   ├── backend.php
│   └── frontend.php
├── fr
│   ├── backend.php
│   └── frontend.php
├── it
│   ├── backend.php
│   └── frontend.php
└── ru
    ├── backend.php
    └── frontend.php

Fallback / Base

Whenever a specific localized version of a text-variable can't be loaded (due to it's missing definition), it's English localization is used as a fallback. Therefore, every text-variable must at least be localized in English (lang/en/frontend.php or lang/en/backend.php).

Loading

Automatically

The Text-Variables of the requested component (identified by section in frontend and cmd in backend) are automatically being loaded (by \InitCMS) and can be accessed through the global $_ARRAYLANG variable.

Manually

If the Text-Variables of any other than the requested component are required, then those can manually be loaded. The prefered way to do so is to fetch the Text-Variables as follows:

// Fetch frontend text-variables of component Calendar
$langData = \Env::get('init')->getComponentSpecificLanguageData('Calendar');

// Fetch backend text-variables of component Calendar
$langData = \Env::get('init')->getComponentSpecificLanguageData('Calendar', false);

The above method will not pollute the Text-Variables into the global $_ARRAYLANG variable. However the loading of the Text-Variables is being cached, whereas the method below does not cache the loaded Text-Variables and does instead fetch the data over and over again. Therefore the above method should be favored over the method below.

The following method allows to inject the Text-Variables of a component into the global variable $_ARRAYLANG:

// Load text-variables of component Calendar.
// The text-variables will afterwards be available through the global $_ARRAYLANG variable
\Env::get('init')->loadLanguageData('Calendar');

Usage

Let's assume we have the following template:

<h2>{TXT_NEWS_OVERVIEW}</h2>

This template contains the text-variable TXT_NEWS_OVERVIEW. This text-variable is subject to the component News, due to the component part (NEWS) of its name.

The selection of the correct localized version of a text-variable is done automatically by Cloudrexx. To output the correct interface text we would now do the following:

// Initialize template system
$templateRepo = $this->getComponentController()->getDirectory(
    true, true
) . '/View/Template/Backend';
$objTemplate = new \Cx\Core\Html\Sigma($templateRepo);

// Load view (template file)
$filename_of_template = 'module_news_overview.html';
$objTemplate->loadTemplatefile($filename_of_template);

// Set interface text
$objTemplate->setVariable('TXT_NEWS_OVERVIEW', $_ARRAYLANG['TXT_NEWS_OVERVIEW']);

Depending on the user's selected locale, this will now output the localized version of the text-variable TXT_NEWS_OVERVIEW.