Delete empty translation records on save

[codingluke]

Hi guys, first I want to say THX for this gem! It saved me ages, is good designed and a pleasure to work with.

Today I came up with something strange, which maybe also is interesting for you. There are also records created for empty languages (all fields empty). As I want to give the users the ability to switch languages (if there are any other available) its a hassle to find out, which languages are filled and which not.

So I implemented an easy solution. A before_filter which removes empty languages form the params hash, or marks empty languages which existed (has han id) with the flag '_destroy' => '1'. Where as the first part works greate. The second part with the '_destory' => '1' gets ignored. I don't know why, because you set allow_destroy: true

# activeadmin-globalize3 / lib / active_admin / globalize3 / active_record_extension.rb
attr_accessible :translations_attributes
accepts_nested_attributes_for :translations, allow_destroy: true 

Here my code:

# Inside an own active_admin page
ActiveAdmin.register MyModel do
  before_filter :remove_or_mark_empty_translations, :only => [:update, :create]

  controller do
    private
    def remove_or_mark_empty_translations
      params[:requisition][:translations_attributes].each do |t|
        # iterates through the fields and checks if they are empty
        # the first two entries (id and locale) are ignored
        if !(t.last.map { |k,v| v.empty? ? true : false }[2..-1]).include?(false)
          if t.last[:id].empty?
            # If id is also empty, remove from params
            # works fine!
            params[:requisition][:translations_attributes].delete(t.first)
          else
            # otherwise mark to destroy
            # FIXME : seems to be ignored
            params[:requisition][:translations_attributes][t.first]['_destroy'] = '1'
          end
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

Have you any ideas or better solutions?

PS: to remove empty translation rows improves also the view helper translation_status ;)

[fabn]

Have you solved this? I was looking for the same thing. IMHO this (awesome) gem should not add empty translations

[fabn]

PS. I've taken your code and in my attempt the '_destroy' flag seems to work.

[codingluke]

@fabn really it works for you? thats great news! So I have to go through my depended code. Maybe I will crate a playground app to test it without dependencies. It would be also great do have a generic solution :)

At the moment I make a pretty ugly workaround. I set the title to "delete_me_after_save" and delete the marked translation with e "after_save" hook.

[fabn]

Yes, it does. I've used your code in my application controller to make it generic in this way when I use it on my resources I only need to put the before_filter line in my resources. Keep in mind that this is just a proof of concept, I haven't used this code in production (yet).

  private
  def remove_or_mark_empty_translations
    # Retrieve used model name
    model = controller_name.singularize.to_sym
    # walk the submitted attributes
    params[model][:translations_attributes].each do |t|
      # iterates through the fields and checks if they are empty
      # the first two entries (id and locale) are ignored
      if !(t.last.map { |_, v| v.empty? ? true : false }[2..-1]).include?(false)
        if t.last[:id].empty?
          # If id is also empty, remove from params
          params[model][:translations_attributes].delete(t.first)
        else
          # otherwise mark to destroy
          params[model][:translations_attributes][t.first]['_destroy'] = '1'
        end
      end
    end
  end

[sepastian]

Hi!

I agree, activeadmin-globalize3 should definitely not create empty translations.

I took your filter and registered it in ActionController::Base during initialization of the Engine - meaning that it will always get triggered on :create and :update, for all models, without manually registering any filters.

Maybe it would also be good to make this an optional feature, i.e. provide config[:delete_existing_empty_translations] and config[:delete_new_empty_translations]. But both should be on by default, I would say not creating any empty translations is what a user would expect. (Will look into creating options when I find the time.)

Could you try this out? Does it work for you? What do you think?