Getting ready

First, we'll need a controller to work with, so create an ExampleController.php file in app/Controller/ with the following content:

<?php
App::uses('AppController', 'Controller');

class ExampleController extends AppController {
}

We'll then need a view, so create a file named language.ctp in app/View/Example/.

How to do it...

Perform the following steps:

How it works...

Here, we first defined a route to handle our language setting via the URL. For this we used the Router::connect() method to register a new route. The first argument is the route template. You'll notice that we defined parts of the URL starting with a :. This character delimits a named element, which we'll want to capture. The second argument was left as an empty array, as we're not specifying any default route parameters. Finally, the third argument had two keys. The first, language, defines the regular expression for our language route element. Here, we're simply stating that it must be a three character string, which matches with the locale codes in the framework. The second key, persist, tells CakePHP that we want all URLs to have this element included. This helps keep our application consistent for all links.

We then added a beforeFilter() method to our AppController class, which reads the CakeRequest::$params array to get the value of language passed via the URL. This is then set to the Config.language configuration option, which sets the default language for the application.

To test the functionality that we added, we created a language() method on our ExampleController. This method reads the value of the Config.language configuration option and sets it to a view variable named $language. Then, in our view, we output some translated strings, as well as the $language variable. When changing the value of the language in your URL, you'll see how it updates the default setting in the framework. Then, if you create some translations of your strings for the given URLs, you would see the view change language.

To further extend the functionality of the language setting, you could add a list of default languages that your applications support. Bear in mind that when a translation is not found, the strings using __() or any other various translation functions will simply default to the given string.

See also