Question

I am working on a project build on the Zend Framework. I’m using Zend_Translate to do my translations, but I want to keep the amount of extra code in the front of my application (views) as minimal as possible. Translation of a text should look like this:

echo __("Text to translate");

Using a view helper isn’t doing it, because then I get:

echo $this->__("Text to translate");

This would mean I have to declare a global function somewhere, that calls for Zend_Translate to do the rest of the magic. Because I want the project to stay as clean as possible I’d like some suggestions on where to put this function.

I have considered including a file with my global function inside of the _initLocale() in the bootstrap.

Basically my question is: am I now violating all the holy MVC principles, or is this the right way to go?

Answer 1

This is actually not an easy question to answer. Of course you’re violating some principles of OOP because you’re basically punctuating your objects with hundreds of little wholes where there should be just one. You should be injecting the translation object into your controllers and views once and then call $this->__(). This is also easily done by creating an intermediate layer between Zend_Controller_Action and your own controllers. BUT… translation is a very specific case and I don’t see much potential harm coming from your solution. The Translation method is not likely to change its logics and if you need to rename it, finding and replacing two underscores followed by a bracket will most probably not yield anything else than translated strings… then again that use of ‘most probably’ is a smell already.

Summary: It seems more or less ok but I still wouldn’t do it, especially if it’s a software of some meaning with an expected life span of some years.