[orm-devel] How to handle multi language?

[Werner F. Bruhin]

Hi Diedrich,

Diedrich Vorberg wrote:

> 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.

But what is the real world object in this case?

I am not talking about the country here but the translation! For you 
being German (am I right) and me being Swiss (of the german variety ;-) 
) the real world object is "Deutschland" but as I live in the South of 
France it could also be "Allemagne" or for my wife (New Zealander) it 
would be "Germany".

>
> 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? ;-)

My initial reaction was this is even worse then having a column per 
language but :-\  (undecided), I will sleep over it.

>
> Diedrich
>
See you and thanks again for comming up with suggestions/ideas.
Werner