[orm-devel] How to handle multi language?

[Diedrich Vorberg]

Hi Werner,

> Why are you both leaning to the column per language approach instead 
> of a row per language approach (txtid, langid, text).
for me personally it's about design and clean modeling, really. One 
data-entity (i.e. row) per real world object. It just "makes sense" to 
me.

There's an alternative, though: one table per language, containing all 
localizable columns, one table with the non-locale depending data, 
sharing a single primary key. As in

CREATE TABLE tree
(
   tree_id SERIAL,
   height INTEGER NON NULL,
   color TEXT NON NULL DEFAULT 'green'
);

CREATE TABLE tree_de
(
   tree_id INTEGER REFERENCES tree(id),
   name TEXT
);

To retrieve data one would JOIN the tree table with the "tree_%s" % 
lang table. This could be accomplished using orm's join class. To 
modify data you'd need one dbclass for the common data, one for each 
language table, whoes columns dict is a deep copy of a template.

This could be a compromise, perhaps? ;-)

Diedrich

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