Trans - Embedded translations for Elixir

Trans is now on version 1.0.0 !!!
You can see the release notes on GitHub. The main changes of this version are the improved support for Elixir 1.3.x and the new requirement of Ecto 2.0.

You can update the version of Trans in your project by adding {:trans, "~> 1.0"} to your mix.exs and then running mix hex.update trans.

As usual, any comments, suggestions, issues or pull-requests are more than welcome!
Love

Hi again! We got a new version of Trans!!

The version 1.0.1 is a minor release that focuses mainly on making Trans more comprehensible by improving the documentation and adding a changelog that conforms to the Keep a Changelog format.

You can see the release notes on GitHub. There are also some nice improvements planned

As usual, any comments, suggestions, issues or pull-requests are more than welcome!
Love

After a long time we have a new version of Trans.

The main changes in version 1.0.2 are:

• Trans now compiles cleanly and is tested on Elixir 1.4.
• The dependency earmark has been removed, since it is already required by ex_doc.
• A CONTRIBUTING.md file has been added, detailing the contribution guidelines.

You can see the release notes and the planned improvements on GitHub.

The next Trans version will focus on making Ecto an optional dependency that is only required when using the QueryBuilder component.

As usual, any comments, suggestions, issues or pull-requests are more than welcome!
Love

So this is not so much for translations of the application, but rather for easily allowing users to create their own translated content for a given set of data? Looks useful.

This is awesome for user-generated sites aspiring to manage multi-lang effortlessly in PostgreSQL with leverage of JSONB types.

Thank you very much for posting about it, I had already in my github stars but forgot about the project now that it might come useful for a side project

Thank you very much for your words @OvermindDL1 and @schp

The mission of Trans is to provide an easy way to retrieve translations from structs or maps, and (optionally) provide an interface for generating Ecto queries by adding conditions on translated fields.

Trans has two main components:

• The Translator mission is to retrieve a translation into the desired language, or fall back to the default one if no translation exists. (I also plan to allow more flexibility into the fallback process).
• The QueryBuilder mission is to allow creating or modifying queries based on translated values. This component does require Ecto and leverages the power of the JSONB data type of PostgreSQL databases to look into the translations for the queries.

At the moment Trans has a hard dependency on Ecto, but I intend to make this dependency optional in the next version. Then, you will be able to use the Translator component without Ecto in any application.
The QueryBuilder will still require Ecto to work though, but it won’t be even compiled if Ecto does not exist in the application.

Edit: I actually plan to support MySQL also, since newer versions also have a JSON type. But there is an open issue in the Mariaex adapter to add support for this type that must be addressed first. I could look into it myself, but I would need some guidance into where to look first

I’ve released a new version of Trans

Trans 1.1.0 makes Ecto an optional dependency.

This update addresses one of the main concerns of trans since its inception: to leverage, but be usable without, a database. The Trans.QueryBuilder component requires Ecto to work, but the Trans.Translator component can be used with any struct or map and does not require a database.

As usual, any comments, suggestions, issues or pull-requests are more than welcome!
Love

Trans 2.0 is out!

This release of Trans is focused on improving the library interface and making it more safe and usable.
The Trans.QueryBuilder module has been completely rewritten. It now exposes the translated/3 macro that generates an SQL fragment that can be used when building Ecto queries.
The new translated/3 macro is compatible with all the functions and macros in Ecto.Query and Ecto.Query.Api and provides safe checks against translations on non existing or non translatable fields.

Compare how you would create a query with Trans 2.0 and before:

# Now: Trans 2.0
iex> Repo.all(from a in Article,
...> where: ilike(translated(Article, a.body, :es), "%elixir%"))

# Before: Trans 1.0
iex> Article
...> |> Trans.QueryBuilder.with_translation(:es, :title, "%République%", type: :like)
...> |> Repo.all

More detailed release notes can be found at GitHub. I also plan to publish soon an article explaining the changes and the reasoning behind them.

EDIT: the promised article about the changes in Trans 2.0 is now published in Medium

As usual, any comments, suggestions, issues or pull-requests are more than welcome!
Love

@belaustegui: Can you explain why you decided to have all translated columns in big jsonb?
After read your description here I through that you do something like:

defmodule Article do
  # use Ecto.Schema
  use Trans.Schema

  schema "articles" do
    trans_field :body, :string
    trans_field :title, :string
  end
end

so any trans_field is a separate map column.
How about performance when you have big jsonb map (with lots of fields) and lots of records?

Do you validating language codes?

For your #12 and #14 issues: in some cases developer prefer to store locales in database for example table named locales could have fields: id, locale, fallback_locale_id, name and description.

btw. You have still opened 2.0.0 milestone and already released 2.0.0 version

Hi @Eiji , I really appreciate your comment.
I completely forgot about the milestone , it is closed now, thanks!

Your idea of trans_field looks really good indeed. Could you open an issue in the project so we can discuss it further?

I went with this approach for Trans because I wanted to port the hstore_translate gem to Elixir.
I share your concerns with the big jsonb field containing all the translations, in particular when fetching lots of data in queries. I’ve not been able to test Trans in any project with high data volume. I’ve used the hstore_translate gem in a Ruby project and this approach was faster than having the translations in their own separated tables (the globalize approach). I think that this performance gain will still apply in Elixir.

I may perform a test comparing Trans performance versus having the translations separated in different tables. It would be a very interesting comparison

Thank you very much!
Cheers.