Christophe Maximin

Warning, this is a dirty but useful hack. I use Rails 2.3.5 and the gem i18n 0.3.3.

If you use internationalization in Rails, you probably already know about the "Lazy Lookup" of I18n :

That's a wonderful feature. However, you can't use it in your controllers, to do things like:

class Admin::BooksController < ApplicationController

  def new
    @book = Book.new
    @page_title = t('.title')
  end

end

... with a config/locales/en.yml containing ...

en:
  admin:
    books:
      new:
        title: 'My fancy title'

I don't really know why it's not available, and I couldn't find anything interesting online, so I did this. You can put it in your application_controller.rb :

  alias_method :t_original, :t
  def t(*args)
    if args.first[0..1] == '..'
      args[0] = params[:controller].gsub('/','.')+args.first[1..-1]
    elsif args.first.first == '.'
      args[0] = params[:controller].gsub('/','.')+'.'+params[:action]+args.first
    end
    t_original(*args)
  end

Now, you can use t() as usual, it will just work the way you intended.

Bonus, if you want do something like t('..new.title'), you can. Here is an example of how it can be used :

class Admin::BooksController < ApplicationController

  def new
    @book = Book.new
    @page_title = t('.title')
  end

  def create
    @book = Book.new(params[:book])
    if @book.save
      flash[:notice] = t('.success')
      redirect_to :action => 'index'
    else
      @page_title = t('..new.title')
      render :action => 'new'
    end
  end

end