Standalone Mode

Standalone mode is designed for the application without singleton service at runtime to support internationalization, the translations and formatting patterns need to be downloaded from singleton service into local asset folder at buildtime. In this way, when the application starts, the Singleton Angular client will get translations and patterns from application web server through HTTP request.

Specification

Register product

No matter the singleton service will be running in product environment or not. For the software globalization process, the first step is always to register the product, component, version and supported locales through singleton service.

Normalize the language code

The language normalization is required when the language comes from user browser lanugage, however, each browser relies on different standard of langugae code, so the normalization is used to map the different format of language code to the singleton standard.

Most of On-Premise applications have the language seletor to narrow down the language options, in that case the language normalization is only for default selection from user browser language, but just to make sure the language code from the language selector is consistent with the value which defined in the downloading script.

import { getBrowserCultureLang, LocaleService } from '@singleton-i18n/angular-client';
...
    get selectedLanguage(): string {
        return localStorage.getItem(
            USER_SELECTED_LANGUAGE
        ) ||
        getBrowserCultureLang() ||
        'en';
    }

    // Singleton provides API to transform the language code from the browser into Singleton standard language code.
    // eg: zh-CN -> zh-Hans
    getNormalizedLanguageCode(language: string): string{
        return this.localeService.normalizeLanguageCode(language);
    }
...

Define script to download locale data

Use npm command line script to download locale data (translation and formatting pattern) into asset folder at buildtime.

load-locale-data

For example

load-locale-data
    -d ./src/assets/i18n/
    --host https://singleton.service.com:8090
    --product Testing
    --component Angular
    --version 1.0
    --locales fr,es,ja,en-GB,pt-BR,de,ko,zh-TW,zh-CN
    --scope dates,numbers,currencies,dateFields

Add script in package.json

scripts: {
    ...
    "load-locale-data": "load-locale-data -d ./src/assets/i18n/ 
                        --host https://singleton.service.com:8090
                        --product ngxSingleton
                        --component Angular
                        --version 1.0.0
                        --locales zh-Hans,en,ja,fr 
                        --scope dates,numbers,currencies,dateFields"
}

Execute script at build time

npm run load-locale-data

Configure i18n assets

If use the local bundles instead of singleton service to support i18n, the asset path should be specified in singleton configuration, so in that case Singleton Angular client will download the locale data from the path at runtime. Moreover, if the application also needs to handle the data formatting, please define the all functional categories which will be used in the configuration as i18nScope and make sure the downloading script contains the same relevant scope definition.

// i18n-config.ts
const I18nConfig = {
    productID: 'ngxSingleton',
    component: 'Angular',
    version: '1.0.0',
    i18nScope: [
        PatternCategories.DATE,
        PatternCategories.NUMBER,
        PatternCategories.CURRENCIES,
        PatternCategories.DATEFIELDS
    ],
    i18nAssets: 'assets/i18n/',
    isPseudo: false,
    collectSource: false,
    sourceBundle: ENGLISH
};

Limitations

Using the local data to support i18n is not a recommended way that only for a transition period prior to singleton service deployed. So before adopting standalone mode, please understand the limitations of this mode as below:

• No uniform language fallback support.
• Only support using default region from language code to format data.
• Can’t update the translation and patterns dynamically without the web server restart.