719757 - Localising categories make some display without text

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Localization, defect)

Description

[Friedel Wolff]

I quickly tried to work on category localisation, and unfortunately it broke things a bit badly. Several of the category names are now simply displayed as blank and the editing interface only shows the ones I translated so far (I was only experimenting with a few to start with).

It would be great if there is some remedy or is able to reset things until the bug is resolved, since this affects all users to the front page for my language (af).

Comment 1

[Rob Hudson [:robhudson]]

The problem was that we were allowing empty strings to pass through on save. And any category name that didn't have a localization had an empty form field, which submitted an empty string on save.

This update prevents empty strings from being valid. This does prevent the localizer from clearing the form field to remove the localization. We will need to fix this in the future.

https://github.com/mozilla/zamboni/commit/154a3e2

Comment 2

[krupa raj[:krupa]]

verified at https://addons-dev.allizom.org/en-US/localizers/ro/categories/

Comment 3

[Friedel Wolff]

As I understand new code is deployed every Thursday, but this is still a problem.

Here are the empty string which I can't translate any more:
https://addons.mozilla.org/af/localizers/af/categories/

Here are the categories with no text to see to click on:
https://addons.mozilla.org/af/firefox/

Should we reopen this bug, or has the code not been deployed? Anything we can do to make the site usable again for Afrikaans (af) users?

Comment 4

[Rob Hudson [:robhudson]]

There's a long standing bug in our translation tables that won't allow us to remove translations without potentially causing other database records to get removed.  See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=521041, and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=720038.

You should, however, be able to change the empty string translation to an actual translated string. If that doesn't work we may need to manually fix the empty strings that got into the database to fix the categories with no text.  Be aware that the site will cache the translations for approximately 5 minutes so if they are updated, they may take that long to show up.

Comment 5

[Friedel Wolff]

Thanks for answering, Rob.  So should I just enter any random text? Will that make the English source text reappear in the localiser panel as well? (I mean that I can't translate it at the moment since no English source text is shown to translate.)

Comment 6

[Rob Hudson [:robhudson]]

I see what you're seeing now. The category localizers page shouldn't actually allow you to view it that way. If you go to this URL with the "en-US" explicitly you'll see the English strings again:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/localizers/af/categories/

Hopefully on that page you can then add appropriate translations to fix the empty strings. Apologies for the confusion.

Bug 722471 was filed to fix that confusion.