Multi-language support in T-SQL

Tomi Lehto — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 06:02:55 +0000

This is brilliant, a little scary, but brilliant. (note added July 2010: OK, A LOT SCARY!)

While back we built a website supporting unlimited languages and articles. For a reason unknown I decided to keep all my content in one table, index it and link my other tables to it.

This concept is quite interesting, I think it’s worth a look. Check out a sample Stored Procedure:

ALTER PROCEDURE dbo.SPSelectArticles
	@categoryid INT,
	@languageid INT,
	@defaultlanguageid INT,
	@maxarticles INT
AS
SET ROWCOUNT @maxarticles
	SELECT
			A.id AS id, CT.content AS title, CD.content AS description, A.publishdate AS publishdate, AC.color AS categorycolor,
			1 AS iscorrectlanguage
	FROM	articles A
	LEFT OUTER JOIN
		contentitems CT ON CT.cid = A.title_cid AND CT.languageid = @languageid
	LEFT OUTER JOIN
		contentitems CD ON CD.cid = A.description_cid AND CD.languageid = @languageid
	INNER JOIN
		articlecategories AC ON A.categoryid = AC.id
	WHERE	A.publishdate < GETDATE() AND
		A.categoryid = @categoryid AND
		CT.content IS NOT NULL
UNION ALL
	SELECT
			A.id AS id, CTD.content AS title, CDD.content AS description, A.publishdate AS publishdate, AC.color AS categorycolor,
			0 AS iscorrectlanguage
	FROM	articles A
	LEFT OUTER JOIN
		contentitems CTD ON CTD.cid = A.title_cid AND CTD.languageid = @defaultlanguageid
	LEFT OUTER JOIN
		contentitems CDD ON CDD.cid = A.description_cid AND CDD.languageid = @defaultlanguageid
	LEFT OUTER JOIN
		contentitems CT ON CT.cid = A.title_cid AND CT.languageid = @languageid
	LEFT OUTER JOIN
		contentitems CD ON CD.cid = A.description_cid AND CD.languageid = @languageid
	INNER JOIN
		articlecategories AC ON A.categoryid = AC.id
	WHERE	A.publishdate < GETDATE() AND
		A.categoryid = @categoryid AND
		CT.content IS NULL
		ORDER BY A.publishdate DESC

The big idea is to pass a language id to this SP, and it does the rest. All the content on a page just changes based on the languageid. I built SP’s like this for main content, random words here and there and this one for articles.

Beauty in this beast is the fact that it looks if translation exists, and returns the default language if not found – in this case English. And it’s reasonably fast, this is written around 4 years ago!

Site has now served almost 6 million (yes, millions) page views in the past 2 years, and is still going strong.

Let me know what you think!

Penguinsoft » t-sql

Multi-language support in T-SQL