information on how messages are used in source code

[samuelstroschein]

Many useful tools can be developed if inlang provides information on how messages are used in source code.

• the ide extension could provide lots of information via the language server protocol https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/.
• inlang could derive whether messages are not used any longer (in source code)
• inlang knows where messages are used (pre-rendering the UI?)

The discussion originated in #351 (comment):

I would investigate the Language Server Protocol
That's a good point. We probably need some metadata like file name, line number and start character position

Yes, but this would probably be a different module @inlang/core/detect or similar.

Such module extends the AST with source code information. That information can be used to provide developers with a sophisticated linting in the IDE but also the automatic extraction of messages from source code. Such module will most likely not collide with the current AST and config definition. The config will be extended by a property that allows plugin authors to define how Messages are detected in source code.

For now, inlang is not touching source code. Instead, inlang solely operates on the common denominator of most localized codebases: resource files. The current AST design and corresponding metadata property reflects the parsing and serialization of resources, not source code.

This also means that each plugin that parses files into an AST needs to provide that information. So parsing json as a simple JS object is no longer possible. A more sophisticated parser is needed.

If the plugin only parses and serializes resource files, nothing changes.

[ivanhofer]

• inlang knows where messages are used (pre-rendering the UI?)

This will probably not work really well. You would probably mount a single component and render it in a headless browser an then take a screenshot. But then the component will probably miss global styles and will not look like it does in the real application.

Another approach would be to inject a script during development. The developer will probably visit that page at least once to see if the reference message shows up. That injected script could take a screenshot of the full page and also highlight the place where the text gets shown with an outline or similar.

[samuelstroschein]

Yep, thought about injecting a script during development too.

I heard rumors about an i18n library that magically handles i18n-related tasks in source code like SSR, CSR, resource splitting, etc ;)

[ivanhofer]

I heard rumors about an i18n library that magically handles i18n-related tasks in source code like SSR, CSR, resource splitting, etc ;)

Sounds like the best i18n library ever 😎

[samuelstroschein]

Related: The feature will be partially added for the ide extension with #376 but not as a core part of inlang for now.