[FIXED] CakePHP actsAs Translate and $Model::find()

Issue

I have attached the Translate behavior to one of my models and I have some shortcomings regarding this:

1) If I don't save data in all fields passed as params when attaching the behavior to the model, $Model::find() method doesn't get the inserted rows.

public $actsAs = array(
    'Translate' => array(
        'title' => 'title_Translation',
        'description' => 'description_Translation',
        'description_long' => 'description_long_Translation'
    )
);

Ex: if i pass to $Model::save() method only a value for 'title', the data is saved, even in the i18n table, but the $Model::find() doesn't get anything. I must pass data for all the fields.

Can I force it to retrieve those records ?

2) How can I get all the records in the admin side of the application (regardless of the language in which a record is saved) in order to list them so the user can alter it (edit data, save data in multiple languages)? Right now, I can only get the records that correspond to the current language (read from Configure or set explicitly)..

Thank you!

Solution

OK, I might be a bit late, but anyway...

1) Cake uses an INNER JOIN when fetching a row and it's associated translations, so basically there's no easy way around this. You have to make sure you save every translatable field, every time - even if you just save it as blank. The only alternative would be to go hacking round the core to make it use a left join rather than an inner join - but don't do that.

2) The cookbook explains how to fetch all records here: http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-libraries/behaviors/translate.html#retrieve-all-translation-records-for-a-field

Now, probably most of the time you want to get just one translation, so you don't want to modify the definition of your $actsAs['Translate'] array in your model. So what I did, was set up a method in AppModel.php which modifies the $actsAs['Translate'] array on the fly:

/*  
 * See http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-libraries/behaviors/translate.html#using-the-bindtranslation-method
 * This is for making it so we fetch all translations, as opposed to just that of the current locale.
 * Used for eg. editing (multiple translations) via the admin interface.
 */
public function bindAllTranslations(){
    $translatableFields = $this->actsAs['Translate'];

    $keyValueFields = array();
    foreach($translatableFields as $field){
        $keyValueFields[$field] = $field.'Translation';
    }

    $this->bindTranslation($keyValueFields,false);  // false means it will be changed for all future DB transactions in this page request - and won't be reset after the next transaction.
}

So, if it's an admin method (or any other situation you want all translations) you call that code before doing a find:

$this->MyModel->bindAllTranslations();
$this->MyModel->find('all');

Hope that helps!

Answered By - joshua.paling