Localizing XSLT templates

Hello everybody,

I’ve been quite busy this period and didn’t have a chance to post more useful notes on my blog, but finally I found some time for this. Today we’re gonna talk about how to localize your XSLT templates (please read about how to localize normal HTML templates here).

Well, the technique is quite simple though. All you need to know is that you can’t use the Translate tag inside your XSLT templates. Instead of using this tag you need to define a special template like the following:

<xsl:template name="translate">
    <xsl:param name="translationkey" />
    <xsl:param name="defaulttranslation" />
    <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="$translationfile/translations/
            key[@name=$translationkey]">

            <xsl:value-of select="$translationfile/
                key[@name=$translationkey]/
                translation[@culture=$currentlanguage]" />
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>
            <xsl:value-of select="$defaulttranslation" />
        </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

As you can see the template has two parameters: translation key (the first argument of the Translate tag) and default translation (the second argument of the Translate tag).

There are also two variables that are used inside the template: $translationfile and $currentlanguage. They are defined as following (put the definition at the top of your XSLT template):

<xsl:variable name="translationfile" select="document('http://localhost/
    Files/Templates/[ModuleSystemName]/Translations.xml')/translations" />
<xsl:variable name="currentlanguage" select="/Template/GlobalTags/
    Global.Area.LongLang" />

Here is a trick. In order to use translations we need to load corresponding XML-document and assign its contents to the value of some variable. There are two drawbacks of this methods that you should know about:

1. You always have to include the host-name component inside the “document” function (you can’t write something like “document(‘/Files/…’) assuming that the absolute path will be resolved).
2. For different page/paragraph/module templates you need to provide the correct path to the translation file (e.g. /Files/Templates/Weblog/Translations.xml and /Files/Templates/ForumV2/Translations.xml for Weblog and ForumV2 templates respectively).

And finally, here’s an example of using the template:

<xsl:call-template name="translate">
    <xsl:with-param name="translationkey" select="'ExtranetLoginText'" />
    <xsl:with-param name="defaulttranslation" 
        select="'You're logged in as:'" />
</xsl:call-template>

Please note that the template call must look exactly like shown above. Otherwise the parser will be unable to recognize this template and you won’t be able to use the translation page on the backend (it simply won’t find any keys in your template).

Cheers! 😉