Introducing Ruby Gem I18nLazyScope

Lately, I’ve been working on some projects that require internationalization. I find it annoying to have to type namespace.key each time I translate something. I can use lazy lookup¹–t('.key')–but it defaults to locale.resource.key, which is not always desirable.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could use lazy lookup and have granular control over the namespace? So, for example, if I typed t(:key) in users#show the scope would default to en.views.users.show.key.

So, to have my cake and eat it, I wrote I18nLazyLookup. It lets you use lazy lookup with custom scopes.

How does it work?

The library inserts a customisable namespace in the scope between the locale and the resource keys. The following table shows the differences (in bold) between I18nLazyLookup and i18n-rails.

Tell me more

Say you are in users_controller#show and you want to flash a welcome message.

def create
  if @user.save
    redirect_to @user, notice: t('welcome_msg')
  end
end

Here, the scope for welcome_message defaults to en, the top level namespace. This is not a good way to structure locale files, and they’ll soon become messy and unmanagable. It’s better to scope them under a namespace.

en:
  controllers:
    users:
      create:
        welcome_msg: "You are such a star!"

redirect_to @user, notice: t('controllers.users.create.welcome_msg')

This is better, but it’s a lot to type. It would be nice if we could write t('.welcome_msg'), but we can’t because rails-I18n scopes the translation to en.users.create.welcome_msg. Our controller namespace is missing.

And that’s where I18nLazyLookup helps. It lets you use lazy lookup with custom namespaces. This makes changing the structure of translations easy.

redirect_to @user, notice: t_scoped(:welcome_msg)

If the defaults don’t work for you, you can customise the namespaces with an initializer.

# app/config/initializers/i18n_lazy_lookup.rb
I18nLazyScope.configure do |config|
  config.action_controller_scope = [:custom, :scope]
  config.action_mailer_scope     = [:custom, :scope]
  config.action_view_scope       = [:custom, :scope]
end

The namespaces now resolve according to the following table.

Check out the project repo on Github for more details.