I have a problem concerning the usage of a DataTransformer. Basically, I am developing a translation tool for my application whose goal is to be as generic as possible. For that, I chose to follow that model : Database modeling for international and multilingual purposes
So, in different entities in my application, I have translatable attributes that simply are references to i18n elements. Then, this i18n ID is referenced in Translation table entries, that handle translation strings.
I succeed handling my translation interface, but I now have a problem with my forms : Indeed, I want some of my entities to be created/updated via forms. The problem is that I don't want the user to set a i18n ID for the translatable fields, of course, but a text, so that it can be handled by my application to either update or create the related translation in database. I thought then that creating a DataTransformer could be a good idea, so that I can get the related translation string from the i18nID that is in my Entity entry (for that way, no problem). But my problem here is for the opposite way :
- How can I deal with creating/updating i18n entries in my reverseTransform() method without knowing the entity values context?
- Is there any way to get the previous entity values so that I could get the i18 ID that is stored originally in my entity? I understand that a Data Transformer is theorically totally independent from my forms and my entities, but I'm totally blocked about how to handle this case.
Indeed, when I save my entity with my translated string, I have no way to know the entity context in my reverseTransform() method, that would have permitted me to get the i18nID of the entity and to update it. I just have the string that typed the user, but I can't do anything with that, because I can't know if it is an update or not since I don't have access to my entities.
Do you have any clue to do that? Is trying to use a DataTransformer to perform this a bad idea?
Thank you !
