Developer note - Delimiter Tag

[fvet]

Hi @rvanbekkum

I'm trying to prepare the move away to AL Language Tools to XLIFF Sync here internally.
I think we can easily adopt our way of working and achieve the same (and much better results) with XLIFF Sync.

However, some developers currently use a - nice - work-around to auto-translate the comments (upfront inside the AL files, not after the XLIFF files have been synced). In order not to offend anyone, I'd still like to - temporarily ? - support this way of working.

E.g. following could the format used when adding new labels, captions, ...
(Mind the " " surrounding the values to be translated)

Caption = 'Item No.', Comment = 'fr-BE="Item No.",nl-BE="Item No."';

• With some shortcuts magic (Ctrl+D / Ctrl+F2), the developer select e.g. all fr-BE tags.
• Then, moves twice to the right and by using the Bracket Selection extension (Alt+A) can easily select everything within the " ".
• If we would remove the " " (as Xliff snippets suggest), we won't be able to select the full text accompanying fr-BE.
• Once the selecting is made, using the VS Code Google Translate, we can batch translate all at once.

Result would be

Caption = 'Item No.', Comment = 'fr-BE="N° article",nl-BE="Artikelnr."';

Animation below shows the current way of working (not yet using the proper language tags )

However, when XLIFF Sync parses the developer notes (using ',' as separator), we still have " " inside the translation / target value.

Would it be an option to provide a new 'Parse From Developer Note Delimiter' setting (cfr. separator), so we can exclude the " " from the translated result?

[rvanbekkum]

Hi @fvet,
So if I understand correctly, you would like an option to have some characters trimmed from the translation?
For example, have:

{
    "parseFromDeveloperNoteTrimCharacters": "\""
}

Would that suit your needs?

[fvet]

Yes, that would do it. Trim the mentioned leading / trailing character (") from the translation.

[fvet]

Hi @rvanbekkum. Any timing on when this could make the next release?

[rvanbekkum]

Hi @fvet,
I think it might be at the end of March the earliest. The past and upcoming days I did not have much time to spent on changes. I also still want to include the changes last suggested in #87 in an upcoming release (even though it has been some time) as I do think they might be useful!

[rvanbekkum]

A change for this is ready for the next release and has been checked in on the develop branch, commit fc0ba6a.

[fvet]

Hi Rob, thanks for the update.

Any timing on when this new feature will be (pre-)released?
Looking forward to test ;)

[rvanbekkum]

Hi Frédéric,
I hope to make a release this week again.

[rvanbekkum]

Released in version 1.3.0.

[dannoe]

@fvet Just out of curiosity: Was replacing the old format (with ") with the new format (without ") not an option? Could be done with a single regular expression and Find&Replace

[fvet]

• Then, moves twice to the right and by using the Bracket Selection extension (Alt+A) can easily select everything within the " ".

As referered to in my initial post, some of the developers use the Bracket Selection extension (Alt+A) to easily select everything within the " " to translate e.g. with VS Code Google Translate.

If we would remove the " ", we won't be able to select the full text accompanying nl-BE.