topic Re: Translation Manager in Alfresco Archive

Translation Manager

aussen2 — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 09:58:25 GMT

I am currently implementing a multi-lingual website on the basis of Web Quick Start (Alfresco Community 3.4d). As there is no out-of-the-box support for managing different translations of the same content in Share yet, I put the translations into different language folders and connected them via my

Re: Translation Manager

bremmington — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:22:42 GMT

I have just posted a page on the wiki that provides a brief overview of this functionality.

Although this functionality is complete except for QA, there are other changes going on in Share at the moment - changes relating to Share extensibility - that are making HEAD quite unstable. I don't actually know right now what the position is. By all means take a look.

Re: Translation Manager

radar1975 — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 20:31:12 GMT

I have just posted a page on the wiki that provides a brief overview of this functionality.

Although this functionality is complete except for QA, there are other changes going on in Share at the moment - changes relating to Share extensibility - that are making HEAD quite unstable. I don't actually know right now what the position is. By all means take a look.

Is there a way to know if this feature will be available soon ?

Or is there a alternative way to make content multilingual support in quick start … perhaps a new content types would be a good alternative while waiting for the Translation Manager ?

Thanks

Re: Translation Manager

vincent_saulnie — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:58:54 GMT

Hi,

The functionality is documented to be available at the end of this month. I'm wondering if Alfresco is still on target with the original plan.

Regards,

Re: Translation Manager

bremmington — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 08:17:59 GMT

I'm not certain what documentation you're referring to, but the appropriate document is the 2011 roadmap which places the Community release in Q3 - that is to say by the end of September. I believe that this is still the plan.

Re: Translation Manager

radar1975 — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 17:29:36 GMT

I'm not certain what documentation you're referring to, but the appropriate document is the 2011 roadmap which places the Community release in Q3 - that is to say by the end of September. I believe that this is still the plan.

We are talking about that here http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Multi-lingual_Web_Quick_Start

Thanks

Re: Translation Manager

aussen2 — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:31:19 GMT

Now that Alfresco Community 4.0.a is out and the Translation Manager is available in WQS I was looking for the corresponding part in the client api in order to get the translations of an asset. I found the web script for the repository tier but couldn't find anything in the client api that seems to talk to that web script. Is this functionality implemented yet?

Re: Translation Manager

bremmington — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:25:34 GMT

The approach that we've taken to website localisation is to make it an editorial function rather than a delivery function. Each locale ends up with its own tree of sections which mean that URLs can be translated (the names of the sections) as well as the content addressed by the URLs. Therefore, each translation of a particular piece of content is treated as an entirely separate asset at delivery time - we haven't provided a means to navigate between translations in the WQS API. Perhaps that was a mistake. What were you hoping to do?

Re: Translation Manager

aussen2 — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 10:10:39 GMT

First of all I want to display links to the translations of the current asset in the web site and would need some way to request this list via the client api. Once I am able to lookup the translations of an asset in the web site I could also draw their metadata into the page that displays this asset. A common use case for this would be an article that is a translation of another article and needs to display the initial publishing date of the original language version alongside its language-specific publishing date.

The web script for looking up the translations of a node in already present in the repository tier and I could just use this to get the nodeRefs and then use client api's getAssetById to receive the assets in the web tier. But this approach would circumvent any of the web tier's caching mechanisms. A solution that integrates nicely with the caching already in place would probably have to work along the lines you already outlined here: https://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=40033

On a second thought maybe I could even use that approach to implement both functionalities (multilingual content with monolingual properties and monolingual content with multilingual properties) in a similar way. I would then always get the full stack of multilingual data when requesting an asset from the repository and could easily display any property in any language in the web site. But that would probably be a bigger change to the WQS project that I would like to perform especially in regard to compatibility with future versions of WQS.

Re: Translation Manager

bremmington — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 10:27:23 GMT

I see. Publishing would probably need some attention to achieve what you're describing. Translated nodes link back to a multi-lingual container (of type cm:mlContainer). All translations of a given node link to the same mlContainer. When publishing a node in WQS, the resulting node (the published node) does not link to an mlContainer. This is the case for a couple of reasons - mainly because we didn't expect linkage between translated nodes in the delivery tier to be needed, and secondarily because it complicates the publishing logic to an extent. This would have to be resolved to ensure you could navigate between translations in the delivery tier.

Re: Translation Manager

aussen2 — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 12:43:31 GMT

Okay, I will try an easier solution for now. What about adding an aspect that contains peer associations to all the translations of an asset? I could extend the TemporaryMultilingualAspect behavior to manage these associations. As far as I can see this behavior is already triggered whenever a new translation is added. Peer associations should work fine with publishing and in the web tier, shouldn't they? And as the assets are all cached in the web tier anyway retrieving the properties of the translations of an asset shouldn't have any impact on the performance. Do you see any problems with this solution?

Re: Translation Manager

bremmington — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:27:28 GMT

That seems like a reasonable approach, yes. Be a little careful of managing your associations when translations are deleted. I've seen cases where associations are not removed when nodes are archived. That may have been fixed, but just test for it.

Re: Translation Manager

aussen2 — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 14:58:03 GMT

The client api (community version 3.4.d) does not return any associations from my new aspect when I use the getRelatedAssets function. I think you mentioned a change in this functionality in another forum thread (https://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=39253). Is that something that only works from 4.0 upwards? Or is this change already in 3.4.e (r26676)?

Re: Translation Manager

bremmington — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 15:10:09 GMT

Oh, sorry. My head's been in 4.0 for so long now I'm forgetting what functionality is available where

The functionality that provides access to custom properties and associations went in on the 3.4 Enterprise stream initially, and, although it was immediately merged onto HEAD, this didn't happen until after 3.4.e. Given that a problem with the CMIS query engine in 4.0.a has caused WQS to break in that version, I don't have any brilliant suggestions to make right now for how to get to where you want to be. Once the issue on 4.0.a has been sorted out then I would suggest moving up to that.