Laravel Multilingual Models

Make Eloquent model attributes translatable without separate database tables for translation values.

Simply access $country->name and you get a value based on your application's current locale.

$country->nameTranslations->en will be the value of a specific locale.

You can get all the translations of a given attributes with $country->nameTranslations->toArray().

Installation

Install the package through Composer:

composer require guidocella/laravel-multilingual

Then publish the config file:

php artisan vendor:publish

Usage

First make sure that the translatable attributes' field type is text or json. If you are building the database from a migration file you may do this:

Schema::create('countries', function (Blueprint $table)
{
	$table->increments('id');
	$table->json('name');
});

Now that you have the database ready to save a JSON string, add the Translatable trait to your models and a public array property $translatable that holds the names of the translatable fields.

class Country extends Model
{
    use GuidoCella\Multilingual\Translatable;

    public $translatable = ['name'];
}

The trait will override the getCasts method to instruct Eloquent to cast all $translatable attributes to array without having to specify them again in $casts.

Now that our model's name attribute is translatable, when creating a new model you may specify the name field as follows:

Country::create([
	'name' => [
		'en' => 'Spain',
		'es' => 'España'
	]
]);

It will be automatically converted to a JSON string and saved in the name field of the database. You can later retrieve the name like this:

$country->name

This will return the country name based on the current locale. If the translation in the current locale doesn't have a non-null value then the fallback_locale defined in the config file will be used.

In case nothing can be found null will be returned.

You may also want to return the value for a specific locale; you can do it using the following syntax:

$country->nameTranslations->en

This will return the English name of the country.

To return an array of all the available translations you may use:

$country->nameTranslations->toArray()

You can update the translation in a single locale with Eloquent's arrow syntax for JSON fields:

$country->update(['name->'.App::getLocale() => 'Spain']);

Validation

You can validate the presence of specific locales like so:

$validator = validator(
    ['name' => ['en' => 'One', 'es' => 'Uno']],
    ['name.en' => 'required']
);

However, this package includes the translatable_required validation rule for requiring that the translations are provided in every locale:

$validator = validator(
    ['name' => ['en' => 'One', 'es' => 'Uno']],
    ['name' => 'translatable_required']
);

You may define the available locales as well as the fallback_locale from the package config file.

Now you only need to add the translated message of our new validation rule: add this to the validation.php translation file:

'translatable_required' => 'The :attribute translations must be provided.',

Queries

Laravel lets you query JSON columns with the -> operator:

Company::where('name->en', 'Monsters Inc.')->first();

Country::orderBy('name->'.App::getLocale())->get();