The language switcher needs the same information as languageLinks
needed, namely the list of locales and the current Path, to construct
the URI to all alternate versions. However, in this case i need access
to this data in the template context, to build the list of links.
At first i use request’s context to hold the list of available locales
from application, and it worked, possibly without ill-effects, but i
realized that i was doing it just to avoid a new parameter. Or, more
precise, an _explicit_ parameter; the context was used to skip the
inner functions between app and template.MustRenderPublic, but the
parameter was there all the same.
Finally, i thought that some handler might want to filter the list of
locales to show only the ones that it has a translation of. In that
case, i would need to extract the locales from the context, filter it,
and create a new request with the updated context. That made little
sense, and made me add the explicit locales parameter.
Since now the template has the same data as languageLinks, there is
little point of having the link in the HTTP response headers, and added
the <link> elements to <head>.
I thought that maybe i could avoid these <links> as they give the exact
same data as the language switch, but Google says nothing of using
regular anchors to gather information about localized versions of the
document[0], thus i opted to be conservative. One can reason that the
<head> has more weight for Google, as most sites with user-generated
content, which could contain these anchors, rarely allow users to edit
the <head>.
[0]: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/international/localized-versions
I had a weird but that sometimes the application would use Spanish as
the default language, even though the user had not passed Spanish as
value of the Accept-Language header and the default is hard-coded to
Catalan.
I learned that language.Matcher **always** returns one of its defined
locales, even if there is no way to match the passed list of languages
to Match. In that case, it returns a confidence of “No”, meaning that
the match failed.
Usually go the default Catalan locale because most of the time this was
set as the first language to Matcher, but since Go randomizes maps,
there were times that Spanish was first.
This is the first form that uses HTMx, and can not return a 400 error
code because otherwise HTMx does not render the content.
Since now there are pages that do not render the whole html, with header
and body, i need a different layout for these, and moved the common code
to handle forms and such a new template file that both layouts can use.
I also need the request in template.MustRender to check which layout i
should use.
Closes#7.
To get the user from the database i have to set the cookie first, that
was already done in database.MustAcquire, but i thought they were too
far apart, even thought they are so related. So, the cookie, and thus
the role, is set when getting the user, that is actually the first thing
to do once the connection is acquired. However, that way the database
package has no knowledge of cookies, and the code that sets the cookie
and retrieves the user are next to each other.
I applied the same logic to the changes of locale.Match: it has not
business knowing that the accept language string comes from a request;
it only needs the actual string. Also, the TODO comment about getting
the user’s locale made no sense, now, because app already knows that
locale, so there is no need to pass the user to the locale package.
Getting the locale is done after retrieving the user from the database,
for the same reason the connection is Acquired as far up as possible:
almost every request will need this value, together with the user and
the database connection.
I am a bit affraid that i will end up with functions that always expect
these three values. Maybe i can put the locale inside user, as it is
the user’s locale, after all, no matter if it came from the database or
the user agent, but connection and user must be separate, i think.
We’ll see.
xgettext does not recognize Get as marker for translatable strings, and
i can not add it as is because Go has many functions called Get, and it
would mark many strings as translatable that should not be, like HTTP
headers.
I believe that Gettext is unusual in Go, because the “correct” way to
spell that function in Go would be GetText, and would not interfere in
any other function.
GettextNoop is just a function that marks the string as translatable but
does not translate it at all. I want this for error messages and such,
that i have to pass the string to a validator function, but it is only
necessary to translate it when the validation fails. I doubt it makes
a difference in peformance, but still.
It does nothing more than to server a single page that does nothing
interesting.
This time i do not use a router. Instead, i am trying out a technique
i have seen in an article[0] that i have tried in other, smaller,
projects and seems to work surprisingly well: it just “cuts off” the
URI path by path, passing the request from handler to handler until
it finds its way to a handler that actually serves the request.
That helps to loosen the coupling between the application and lower
handlers, and makes dependencies explicit, because i need to pass the
locale, company, etc. down instead of storing them in contexts. Let’s
see if i do not regret it on a later date.
I also made a lot more packages that in Numerus. In Numerus i actually
only have the single pkg package, and it works, kind of, but i notice
how i name my methods to avoid clashing instead of using packages for
that. That is, instead of pkg.NewApp i now have app.New.
Initially i thought that Locale should be inside app, but then there was
a circular dependency between app and template. That is why i created a
separate package, but now i am wondering if template should be inside
app too, but then i would have app.MustRenderTemplate instead of
template.MustRender.
The CSS is the most bare-bones file i could write because i am focusing
in markup right now; Oriol will fill in the file once the application is
working.
[0]: https://blog.merovius.de/posts/2017-06-18-how-not-to-use-an-http-router/
jordi fita mas