The design calls for rendering all amounts with their currency symbol,
but golang.org/x/text’s currency package always render the symbol in
front, which is wrong in Catalan and Spanish, and a lot of other
languages.
Consulting the Internet, the most popular package for that is
accounting[0], which is almost as useless because they confuse locale
with the currency’s country of origin’s “usual locale” (e.g., en-US for
USD), which is also wrong: in Catalan i need to write USD prices as
"1.234,56 $" regardless of what Americans do.
With accounting i have the recourse of initializing the struct that
holds all the “locale” information, which is also wrong because i have
to define the decimal and thousands separators, something that depends
only on the locale, next to the currency’s precision, that is
locale-independent. But, since all CLDR data from golang.org/x/text
is inside an internal package, i can not access it and would need to
define all that information myself, which defeats the purpose of using
an external package.
Since for now i only need the format pattern for currency, i just saved
it into the database of available languages, that i do not expect to
grow too much.
[0]: https://github.com/leekchan/accounting
I do not want to use floats in the Go lang application, because it is
not supposed to do anything with these values other than to print and
retrieve them from the user; all computations will be performed by
PostgreSQL in cents.
That means i have to “convert” from the price format that users expect
to see (e.g., 1.234,56) to cents (e.g., 123456) and back when passing
data between Go and PostgreSQL, and that conversion depends on the
currency’s decimal places.
At first i did everything in Go, but saw that i would need to do it in
a loop when retrieving the list of products, and immediately knew it was
a mistake—i needed a PL/pgSQL function for that.
I still need to convert from string to float, however, when printing the
value to the user. Because the string representation is in C, but i
need to format it according to the locale with golang/x/text. That
package has the information of how to correctly format numbers, but it
is in an internal package that i can not use, and numbers.Digit only
accepts numeric types, not a string.
I implemented the Valuer and Scanner interfaces to InputField and
SelectField for better passing values between the database and Go. I
had a conflict with the Value name and renamed the struct member to Val.
I also had to change the attributes array to be of type
template.HTMLAttr or html/template would replace `form="newtax"`
attribute to `zgotmplz="newtax"` because it deems it “unsafe”. I do
not like having to use template.HTMLAttr when assigning values, but
i do not know what else i can do now.
This is just to set the correct `lang` attribute on the HTML, so that
text readers can do its job and the `(optional)` suffix of labels gets
the correct ”translation”.
Let’s start first with a non-fancy validation method with just if
conditionals instead of bringing yet another complicated library. I
hope i do not regret it.
I wanted to move all the input field to a template because all that
gobbledygook with the .input div and repeating the label in the
placeholder was starting to annoy me. Now with error messages was even
more concerning.
I did not know whether the label should be a part of the input fields
or something that the template should do. At the end i decided that
it makes more sense to be part of the input field because in the error
messages i use that same label, thus the template does not have a say
in that, and, besides, it was just easier to write the template.
The same with the error messages: i’ve seen frameworks that have a map
with the field’s id/name to the error slice, but then it would be
a bit harder to write the template.
I added AddError functions instead of just using append inside the
validator function, and have a local variable for whether it all went
OK, because i was worried that i would leave out the `ok = false`
in some conditions.
I had started writing “constructors” functions for InputField and
SelectField, but then had to add other methods to change the required
field and who knows what else, and in the end it was easier to just
construct the field inline.
I do not have more time to update the update to the company today, but i
believe this is already a good amount of work for a commit.
The company is going to be used for row level security, as users will
only have access to the data from companies they are granted access, by
virtue of being in the company_user relation.
I did not know how add a row level security policy to the company_user
because i needed the to select on the same relation and this is not
allowed, because it would create an infinite loop.
Had to add the vat, pg_libphonenumber, and uri extensions in order to
validate VAT identification numbers, phone numbers, and URIs,
repectively. These libraries are not in Debian, but i created packages
for them all in https://dev.tandem.ws/tandem.
Had to call xgettext on Go source files because now the title comes from
there, as i assume i will have titles like "Invoice #INVxxxx" that have
to come from the database that the template does not know.
I had to choose between [1], [2], and [3].
As far as i could find, [1] is not easy to work with templates[4] and at
the moment is not maintained[5].
Both [2] and [3] use the same approach to be used from within templates:
you have to define a FuncMap with template functions that call the
message catalog. Also, both libraries seems to be reasonably
maintained, and have packages in Debian’s repository.
However, [2] repeats the same mistakes that POSIX did with its
catalogs—using identifiers that are not the strings in the source
language—, however this time the catalogs are written in JSON or YAML!
This, somehow, makes things worse….
[3], the one i settled with, is fine and decently maintained. There are
some surprising things, such as to be able to use directly the PO file,
and that it has higher priority over the corresponding MO, or that the
order of parameters is reversed in respect to gettext. However, it uses
a saner format, and is a lot easier to work with than [3].
The problem, of course, is that xgettext does not know how to find
translatable strings inside the template. [3] includes a CLI tool
similar to xgettext, but is not a drop-in replacement[6] and does not
process templates.
The proper way to handle this would be to add a parser to xgettext, but
for now i found out that if i surround the call to the translation
functions from within the template with parentheses, i can trick
xgettext into believing it is parsing Scheme code, and extracts the
strings successfully—at least, for what i have tried. Had to add the
keyword for pgettext, because Schemed does not have it, but at least i
can do that with command line parameters.
For now i left only Spanish and Catalan as the two available languages,
even though the source text is written in English, because that way i
can make sure i do not leave strings untranslated.
[1]: https://golang.org/x/text
[2]: https://github.com/nicksnyder/go-i18n
[3]: https://github.com/leonelquinteros/gotext
[4]: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/39954
[5]: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/12750
[6]: https://github.com/leonelquinteros/gotext/issues/38
jordi fita mas