TYPO3 - Using Fluid StandaloneView to render localized templates in a scheduler task (part 1)

tl;dr: If you want to use Fluid StandaloneView to render a template in a given language from the backend context ( e.g. scheduler task), make sure you set the language in $GLOBALS['BE_USER']->uc['lang']

If you want to switch the language several times in one request, please read on in part 2 of this blogpost.

Problem description

For my Event Management TYPO3 Extension I am developing a feature, where I need to send out localized e-mails to users. The e-mail content is created using a Fluid StandanloneView in a TYPO3 scheduler task. Actually, this doesn’t work out of the box.

In TYPO3 you can use Fluid StandaloneView to render HTML based content, which e.g. can be added to body field of an HTML e-mail. The TYPO3 Wiki contains some code snippets on how this can be processed. If you use the provided code snippets in your ExtBase extension, it works fine for localized content as long as you use it in the frontend context of TYPO3 (e.g. website user requests an action).

When you use Fluid StandaloneView from the backend context to generate localized content, the output differs from what you would expect. When you are logged in as a TYPO3 backend user, then the localized content is rendered with the language the backend user has chosen in the user setup. In addition, if you render a Fluid StandaloneView from a commandController, then the language is ignored completely.

Solution

After digging into the problem, I found a simple way to control the language which is used during the rendering process of the Fluid StandaloneView. For the backend context, you just need to set a language (ISO2 code, lowercase) in the $GLOBALS['BE_USER']->uc['lang'] setting. Below follows a code example which shows how this is done (see line 12).

Note, that you also have to make sure, that the Fluid StandaloneView knows, from which extension the localizations get loaded. This is set in line 24.

The shown method works in both TYPO3 6.2 and the current TYPO3 master. I provided a little demo extension, which I used for testing purposes. It contains a backend module and a command controller which renders a Fluid StandaloneView with a given language.

Technical background

The f:translate viewHelper uses the TYPO3 LocalizationUtility to render localized content. For the frontend context, all labels are translated depending on the language set in $GLOBALS['TSFE']->config['config']['language']. For the backend context, the language set in $GLOBALS['BE_USER']->uc['lang'] is used.