Add ability to return default value if no translation found

[hsul4n]

Hello there,

I'am wondering if some of my data can't be localized such as company names, acronym or even not translated yet.

How can I get the default value if transaction not found, should I add the two values into json localization.

What about adding property to enable/disable fallback so we can refer to default value if fallback is turned off.

For example: fallback_enabled => true|false

[AbdElrahmaN31]

If I got you, I think you can add this 'fallback_locale' => 'en' in your config\translatable.php file.
If the local you want doesn't exists the fallback value will be returned

[hsul4n]

@AbdElrahmaN31,fallback_locale option already exists as shown in docs.

I mean that if one of my records is not localized I got empty rather than getting the default value.

So if we can have something like fallback_enabled option which can return the default value whenever localization fails.

[darcyrailip]

Chiming in here to agree that there should be some fallback if the key is not translated yet.

For example, we have a $project->title = "Toy Story" in the DB already, and we just added translations to the title key.

If we pull $project->title (using, say en_US), and the hash hasn't been created yet, it should still return "Toy Story" instead of null.

This would be very useful so that we don't need to run a script every time we add a new translatable field.

[DePalmo]

I agree on this one, would be really handy!

[DePalmo]

At first I thought that this option is something new but I just tested it. My test had this entry in DB:

{
"en":"Actionlists",
"nl":"Actionlists"
}

And config/translatable.php has 'fallback_locale' => 'en'.

So, user can switch between English and Dutch and it will load appropriate translated strings. Then as a test I added another locale, fr and tried again. To my surprise, it loaded en. So what are you guys asking for? Since I assumed that there's no default fallback option available and we get empty string or NULL when requesting for a non-existing locale, but obviously we're getting back a default locale set in config, if requested locale is not found.

Isn't this exactly what you're asking for?

[darcyrailip]

My use-case would be if we are adding translations to an existing string field.

{ title: "Toy Story" }

Would want $film->title to equal "Toy Story" however this will return null.

Once translated, this field looks like:

{ title: { "en": "Toy Story" } }

Both use-cases above should return "Toy Story" for $film->title, ideally.

So not about non-existing locale but about non-existing translations entirely, AKA when the JSON translations are not present it should return the value itself.

So if I am trying to read fr translations:

1. Try to find fr key
2. Use fallback en key
3. Return value itself if no translations are present

[vishaltarkar]

I was having the same issue and as a solution, I have overwritten its existing trait.
Spatie\Translatable\HasTranslations

& create a function where I store fallback lang value same as the current lang. value.

public static function setTranslationForFallbackLang($model, $attribute, $locale, $value)
    {
        if (config('translatable.fallback_locale') != null && config('translatable.fallback_locale') != $locale) {
            $model->setTranslation($attribute, config('translatable.fallback_locale'), $value);
        }
        return $model;
    }

I understand this might not be a perfect way to do this Also It might return the wrong translation but it fixes the issue of returning blank values.

[khwabscript]

I found one simple solution to achieve this. I have overwritten trait's getTranslations method inside model class:

class NewsItem extends Model
{
    use HasTranslations {
        HasTranslations::getTranslations as traitGetTranslations;
    }

    public function getTranslations(string $key = null, array $allowedLocales = null): array
    {
        return $this->traitGetTranslations($key, $allowedLocales) + [
            config('app.fallback_locale') => data_get($this->attributes, $key, ''),
        ];
    }
 }

So, the final array of translations is expanded with the default attribute value, without overwriting the value of the existing translation.
I think there should be a better solution, but this one at least is simple.

[liepumartins]

Addressed these shortcomings this way. @khwabscript script was not enough for some cases. :)

use Spatie\Translatable\HasTranslations;

trait HasTranslationsDefaultFallback
{
    use HasTranslations;

    public function getTranslations(string $key = null, array $allowedLocales = null): array
    {
        if ($key !== null) {
            $this->guardAgainstNonTranslatableAttribute($key);

            return array_filter(
                json_decode($this->getAttributes()[$key] ?? '' ?: '{}',
                    true) ?: [config('app.fallback_locale') => $this->getAttributes()[$key] ?? null],
                fn($value, $locale) => $this->filterTranslations($value, $locale, $allowedLocales),
                ARRAY_FILTER_USE_BOTH,
            );
        }

        return array_reduce($this->getTranslatableAttributes(), function ($result, $item) use ($allowedLocales) {
            $result[$item] = $this->getTranslations($item, $allowedLocales);

            return $result;
        });
    }
}