Plugins usually let the user interact with Freedomotic, e.g. by showing dialog boxes, logging messages and so on. I’d be advisable to let plugin use the user’s language in order to make them much usable and understendable. If you’re a developer and want to add your plugin the capability to ‘speak’ different languages, just follow this simple guide to adapt your code.
Freedomotic ships a mechanism for easily support localized strings and allows the developer to use a prebuild bag of general purpose strings. Moreover the developer could add custom messages on his/her own.
First of all we need to access to API so let’s add the following code
private API api;
private I18n i18n;
api = getApi();
i18n = api.getI18n();
The static function to use in place of your ‘unlocalized’ string is i18n.msg(_STRING_KEY_).
Here a quick example
// old code (non localized)
LOG.info("Hello");
// new code (localized)
LOG.info(i18n.msg("greeting"));
In the plugin manifest file you have to add the property <property name="enable-i18n" value="true"/>.
Freedomotic reads some system config to automatically guess user locale
it searches proper localization string inside /i18n/<Freedomotic locale>.properties.
If the current locale is not defined (translation doesn’t exist) en_UK is used and Freedomotic.properties file is loaded.
If global translation strings aren’t enough plugin developer could write custom strings and save them using the following path starting from plugin base folder
/i18n/<package-name>.properties\ for en_UK
or
/<plugin_package_name>/i18n/<package_last_part>-<locale>.properties
e.g.
/jfrontend/i18n/jfrontend.properties
/jfrontend/i18n/jfrontend-es_ES.properties
Just pass the current object as a parameter to i18n.msg()
LOG.info("Plugin " + i18n.msg(this,"plug_name"));
Consider the following example: we want to translate “save environment as”, “save object as”, “save room as” and so on. The translation file looks like this
| Key string | Default translation | it_IT localization |
|---|---|---|
| save_as | Save as | Salva come |
| environment | Environment | Ambiente |
using a concatenation of strings i18n.msg("save_as") + i18n.msg("environment"); doesn’t work and it’ll result in “save as environment” ...
We can then use basic Java string format like that
| Key string | Default translation | it_IT localization |
|---|---|---|
| save_as | Save {0} as... | Salva {0} come... |
| environment | Environment | Ambiente |
i18n.msg("save_as",new Object[]{i18n.msg(environment)});
So the second variable is given as replacement for placeholder {0}.
This applies to many placeholders, not only one.