l10n + custom fields

[MattyT]

On Thu, 2002-10-17 at 10:19, Bradley Baetz wrote:

> What about stuff like product/component descriptions? Or keyword/flag 
> descriptions? Then again, for an installation which only supports one 
> language (whatever that language may be), they can just write the 
> description in that language. That may be the best solutionm.

I've been thinking about this somewhat, and I initially had the same
reservations as you about the two approaches.

However, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that putting
the translations into the database is the way to go.

This would involve a subsidiary table for name and description of
keywords, groups, etc.  A "default" name and description could probably
still sit on the main table for the case nothing matches.

The performance issue I don't believe is major, on the proviso that our
target databases support compound primary keys (I don't know if they do,
I hope so), which would be on value-ID/language.  In this situation you
need to do an extra join, but it's a simple index lookup.  If you want
to support locales within languages, then that's a bit more complicated,
I think it would either need to be a subselect using LIMIT (to select
the most appropriate record), or alternatively two joins, one against
the language (although this could return multiple records too I
suppose), and one against the language/locale.

I have a hard time believing this is an area we have performance
problems anyway, and we already have a caching solution (versioncache)
to negate the effects of slow queries.  If we stick with versioncache
there would need to be a different one for each language, but that's
pretty easily done.  If we don't, and this is a performance hit,
whatever future caching solution we use should be able to deal with it.

And as for the extra complexity it would add to queries, this should not
be a problem if we add functionality to the eventual back end API to
transparently generate the appropriate SQL and return the correct
results.

-- 
         Matthew Tuck: Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy        
 My Short Autobiography: 1985 Grade Bin Monitor 1990 Class Clown Award
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