Level 63
I don't understand if your question is about the internationalization or about the way to display data tables without knowing which table is shown.
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Oct 3, 2022
13
Level 8
many tables, each needs to display different columns
I have a page that has a list of links to data tables. Each table shows different dataset with different column names. So the columns and column headers are different for each table. I am trying to make Laravel display all these tables using the same Blade file.
I was thinking about using Localization: https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/localization
For example, for the next table:
id | first_name | last_name | date_of_birth
I will do something like:
// lang/en_US.json
{
"first_name": "first name",
"last_name": "last name",
"date_of_birth": "date of birth",
}
Then replace the column names in Blade: (fetching the necessary columns from the Controller)
// for each column . .
<th> {{ __($column_name) }} </th>
// and so on
In this example it may look odd because I used English, but the actual app needs more languages other than English.
Is this a good solution or I should use something else?
*The only thing I'm not sure about is that this is not the actual purpose of localization - it's supposed to translate from one language to another, not from some values to english (and then to other languages)
Level 8
@vincent15000 It's both because the columns names from the db are unknown and also I need to translate them. I also edited the post to make it more readable, I read it badly at first (I think it's better now)
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Level 63
@Ligonsker These are two different problems.
If you need to translate the columns names, you can use either a JSON file or a PHP language file as mentioned in the Laravel documentation.
For your second question about the columns names, you can retrieve the columns names using this method, for example for the Post model.
$postColumns = Schema::getColumnListing('posts');
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Level 8
@vincent15000 and then mutate the columns names in the controller itself?
So not translate stuff like first_name etc in the localization files but rather in the controller, then use localization to translate these columns wherever they are displayed (the blade table in this case)
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Level 63
@Ligonsker Why not in the localization files ? The purpose of a controller is not to manage the translations. But in the controller you can retrieve the columns names, then you can display them in the view.
For example.
// if $postColumns[0] == 'title';
// if $postColumns[1] == 'page_number';
foreach ($postColumns as $postColumn) {
{{ __($postColumn) }} // here 'title' and 'page_number' will be translated
}
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Level 8
@vincent15000 But I also need to translate them from the column names (underscore for example) to English first
Because if the name of the column in the db is page_number then before I translate it from English to another language I'll also need to convert it to "page number" without the underscore in this example.
So first it would be a translation from db column name to English, then localization files would translate from English to another language?
Or I will also use localization to translate db columns to English
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Level 63
@Ligonsker Oh you would like to translate page_number to Page number for example ?
You can for example try to use these functions.
use Illuminate\Support\Str;
...
$englishName = Str::ucfirst(Str::replace('_', ' ', $postColumn)); // will transform page_number to Page number
1 like
Level 8
@vincent15000 I know but this was a simple example, sometimes the column names just don't match exactly and not always consistent (This was the underscore example which replace would work, but in my case there are many columns that just don't match 1:1 to the actual translation)
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Level 63
@Ligonsker There is sadly no real solution to solve your problem. Laravel and PHP are not magic, if you need to display some translated names, you necessarily need to write all these translations in a file.
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Level 8
@vincent15000 exactly! so I should first have a separate file (not localization) that is in charge for translating DB columns to English, and then use Laravel localization to translate that?
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Level 63
@Ligonsker That's exactly what I mean.
Why don't you do that ? But the code won't be able to guess the names.
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Level 8
@vincent15000 thanks, will try. What do you mean by "But the code won't be able to guess the names" ?
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Level 63
@Ligonsker If you have solved your problem, don't forget to mark a best answer to close this post.
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