TYPO3 Flow / Fluid - translating select fields

In a TYPO3 Flow project, I had to create a select box with countries, from which the user could select one. This task is really easy with TYPO3 Flow. Just create a domain and repository for the countries, add the necessary templates and create the country-records. Now you are ready to create a relation from a existing domain (e.g. a domain with some address-fields) to the country domain. No problems here. But what, if you want to translate the country-names in different languages?

The Fluid viewhelper "f:form.select" seems to have an argument called "translate" which can handle translation of select fields labels. I could'nt find a tutorial how to use this argument and finally found out, that everything was described directly in the viewhelpers class.

Here is a short summary on how to use the f:form.select viewhelper together with the "translate" argument.

Assume you have an domain called "country". It only has one property called "alpha2", which is a string representing the country's ISO-3166 alpha2-code. You create some records in the new domain like "DE" for Germany, "DK" for Denmark and so on. You also have an domain called "address", where you have a relation to the country domain.

The first thing to do is to create the translation files. In this example I create one for english and one for german.


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xliff version="1.2" xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:xliff:document:1.2">
    <file original="" source-language="en"  datatype="plaintext">
        <body>
            <trans-unit id="DE">
                <source>Germany</source>
            </trans-unit>
            <trans-unit id="DK">
                <source>Denmark</source>
            </trans-unit>
        </body>
    </file>
</xliff>


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xliff version="1.2" xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:xliff:document:1.2">
    <file original="" source-language="en" target-language="de"  datatype="plaintext">
        <body>
            <trans-unit id="DE">
                <source>Germany</source>
                <target>Deutschland</target>
            </trans-unit>
            <trans-unit id="DK">
                <source>Denmark</source>
                <target>Dänemark</target>
            </trans-unit>
        </body>
    </file>
</xliff>

Next you should configure your f:form.select viewhelper, so it uses the translations.


<f:form.select property="country" id="country" options="{countries}" optionLabelField="alpha2" translate="{using: 'label'}"/>

The viewhelper is configured to use "alpha2" as a label field and to use the label field for translation. There are several other options for the translate argument (e.g. the "source" attribute which enables you to select a different localization file), which are described directly in the class.

Now you just have to assign the object "countries" (containing all countries from the country-repository) through the controller to the corresponding view and you're done.

A TechBlog by Torben Hansen

TYPO3 Flow / Fluid - translating select fields