TYPO3 - Using Fluid StandaloneView to render localized templates in a scheduler task (part 2)

Today I found, that the technique I described in my blogpost about rendering localized Fluid templates in a scheduler task does not work as expected. As long as you want to switch the language used to render the templates only one time, then you're fine. But as soon as you want to switch the language several times (e.g. sending multiple localized e-mails in one request), then you experience that only the first language switch is respected.

The root cause for this is the TYPO3 LocalizationUtility, which includes the static translate() method that is used return translated language labels from XLF/XML language files. The LocalizationUtility is not designed to handle multiple language switches in one request, so at this point I'm stuck.

I order to keep things simple for the integrator (use one e-mail template with language labels to send out localized e-mails in a scheduler task), I decided to create an own viewHelper which uses a modified version of the LocalizationUtility. The modified version of the LocalizationUtility does not contain any static variables or methods and can be used with dependency injection. You can find the code in this GitHub repository.

Usage

In my Fluid StandaloneView templates I now use my own translate viewHelper as shown below.

The viewHelper uses the LocalizationService (which is the TYPO3 LocalizationUtility with some small modifications - e.g. removed all "static" declarations). As a result of this, all functionality of the original viewHelper / TranslationUtility are remained (e.g. overwriting language labels with TypoScript)

I extended the original demo extension from my first blogpost so it makes use of the new viewHelper / LocalizationService. The Extension now includes a form, which renders multiple Fluid StandaloneViews in one request and the language is switched for each individual StandaloneView (see result-section in the screenshot below)

The demo extension also includes a command controller, which includes a command that also renders multiple standaloneViews in one request (see screenshot below)

If I don't find any major problems, I will make use of this technique to send out multilingual e-mails in a scheduler task in my Event Management Extension.

Final notice

The technique shown should only be used in the backend context of TYPO3 when you want to render multilingual Fluid StandaloneViews in one request. I'm not very happy with the approach of "just" taking some code from the TYPO3 core and adapting it to my needs, since this is not always a clean solution and it may include some drawbacks.

TYPO3 - Using Fluid StandaloneView to render localized templates in a scheduler task (part 1)

tl;dr: If you want to use Fluid StandaloneView to render a template in a given language from the backend context (e.g. scheduler task), make sure you set the language in $GLOBALS['BE_USER']->uc['lang']

If you want to switch the language several times in one request, please read on in part 2 of this blogpost.

Problem description

For my Event Management TYPO3 Extension I am developing a feature, where I need to send out localized e-mails to users. The e-mail content is created using a Fluid StandanloneView in a TYPO3 scheduler task. Actually, this doesn't work out of the box.

In TYPO3 you can use Fluid StandaloneView to render HTML based content, which e.g. can be added to body field of an HTML e-mail. The TYPO3 Wiki contains some code snippets on how this can be processed. If you use the provided code snippets in your ExtBase extension, it works fine for localized content as long as you use it in the frontend context of TYPO3 (e.g. website user requests an action). 

When you use Fluid StandaloneView from the backend context to generate localized content, the output differs from what you would expect. When you are logged in as a TYPO3 backend user, then the localized content is rendered with the language the backend user has chosen in the user setup. In addition, if you render a Fluid StandaloneView from a commandController, then the language is ignored completely.

Solution

After digging into the problem, I found a simple way to control the language which is used during the rendering process of the Fluid StandaloneView. For the backend context, you just need to set a language (ISO2 code, lowercase) in the $GLOBALS['BE_USER']->uc['lang'] setting. Below follows a code example which shows how this is done (see line 12).



Note, that you also have to make sure, that the Fluid StandaloneView knows, from which extension the localizations get loaded. This is set in line 24.

The shown method works in both TYPO3 6.2 and the current TYPO3 master. I provided a little demo extension, which I used for testing purposes. It contains a backend module and a command controller which renders a Fluid StandaloneView with a given language.

Technical background

The f:translate viewHelper uses the TYPO3 LocalizationUtility to render localized content. For the frontend context, all labels are translated depending on the language set in $GLOBALS['TSFE']->config['config']['language']. For the backend context, the language set in $GLOBALS['BE_USER']->uc['lang'] is used.