Variants

Runtime variants

When working with html selects or lists from a database that need translating, it's not possible to use compile-time key lookup. That's where variants come in.

Variants are similar to pluralizations as in that they're a locale key containing multiple values:

en:
  color_variants:
    pink: "Millennial pink"
    teal: "Deep teal"
    yellow: "Bright yellow"

If the key name contains the _variants suffix, Rosetta will treat it as a translation with variants. They t() method for translations with variants will then require a variant argument:

Rosetta.find("color_variants").t(variant: "pink")
# => "Millennial pink"

One disadvantage of variants is that their lookup happens at runtime, so you'll have to make sure all variants are present in the locale files.

Compile-time variants

Runtime variants can be avoided if the variant keys are known at compile-time. Given the following translations:

en:
  colors:
    pink: "Millennial pink"
    teal: "Deep teal"
    yellow: "Bright yellow"

A macro can be used to build the locale keys:

{% begin %}
  {% for variant in %w[pink teak yellow] %}
    Rosetta.find("colors.{{variant.id}}").t
  {% end %}
{% end %}