Liferay has a built-in mechanism for handling localization of some DB fields. It uses a particular XML format and some APIs to get a value based on a java.util.Locale.

You have to use the Service Builder to leverage this capability. Below are the different steps to follow.

Definition of your entity in service.xml

You have to add the attribute localized=true on the field you want to be localized.

<entity name="MyEntity">
…
  <column name="title" type="String" localized="true" />
…
</entity>

What’s generated at model layer

Couple of new methods are generated for the entity MyEntity, here are the important ones:

  • getTitle() : returns the plain XML value stored in database
  • getTitle(locale) : returns the localized value of the field given the locale. If the translation is not available, the default translation will be retrieved
  • getTitleMap() : returns the XML parsed as a Map, containing all translations of the field

View layer

In the view part you have to use a specific tag from taglib liferay-ui. It will generate an input text and a piece of UI to add more translations (same as you have when creating a Layout).

You have to pass the plain XML value of the field title using method myEntity#getTitle()

<c:set var="titleAsXML">
 <c:out value="${myEntity.title}" escapeXml="false"  />
</c:set>
                    
<liferay-ui:input-localized
  formName="myForm"  
  name="titleLocalization"
  xml="${titleAsXML}" 
/>

Be careful on the attribute formName, it has to be the name of your form without the portlet namespace (it will be added when generating HTML)

Controller layer

In your controller layer, you just have to use a custom method to retrieve all the translations of the field from the request (the tag generates inputs text with a special name : field name + locale)

Here is the method to use:

Map<Locale, String> titleAsMap = LocalizationUtil.getLocalizationMap(portletRequest, "titleLocalization");

Service layer -- Creation / Update of a MyEntity record

When creating / updating a MyEntity record you have to use the method MyEntity#setTitleMap.

It takes a Map as input, the one you just retrieved in the controller layer.