Feature: add metadata to translations

I want to add some metadata to translations, which would also be extracted during lingui extract process.

Use case: I want to specify the type of the translation, and later, in the CMS, present the user with a different editor based on the translation type.

<h1 className="title">
    <Trans id="home.title" type="text">Page title</Trans>
</h1>
<p className="lead">
    <Trans id="home.lead"" type="textarea">Some long text, bla bla. Users will expect textarea or maybe even rich text editor</Trans>
</p>

I can write a custom extractor to do this, but I was thinking that maybe we can add support for this directly to the Lingui library. What do you think? Does it make sense to put metadata on translations?

To be honest, I haven’t really thought things through 😃 I mean, I could easily write my message ids like ${ns}.${key}.${type} 😃

<Trans id="home.title.text" />
or
<Trans id="home.lead.textarea" />

[tricoder42]

Yeah, it should be possible to add metadata when using lingui format.

One metadata I have thought about was help text for translators:

{/* i18n: Month */}
<Trans>May</Trans>

This would be extracted as:

{
  "May": {
    "translation": "",
    "help": "Month",
    "origin": [...]
  }
}

We might use similar syntax to add other meta tags depending on usecase.

I’m not 100% convinced about type as it could be guessed from content (e.g: type = text, markdown, icu).

[tricoder42]

RFC - support metadata in js.macro

t macro is the same as i18n.t what we have now. If we want to add support for metadata, we need to figure out all possible variation, how the macro is used.

Description is type Description = string | Object, where object might contain arbitrary data. Using string is a shortcut for { description: string } object.

The problem is, that using Description as a string clashes with message ID, which is also a string. In simple usecase t("hello")'Message' it’s impossible to determine whether hello is ID or description.

Please vote with reaction or suggest different API.

Variation 👍

t template tag is used for all messages. Description must be always second argument.

// Message used as an ID, without description
t`Default message`

// Message with custom ID, without description
t("message.id")`Default message`

// Message with custom ID and description
t("message.id", "description")`Default message`

// Message used as an ID, with description
t(null, "description")`Default message`

Variation ❤️

t template tag is used only for messages used as IDs, t.id template tag is used for messages with custom IDs

// Message used as an ID, without description
t`Default message`

// Message used as an ID, with description
t("description")`Default message`

// Message with custom ID, without description
t.id("message.id")`Default message`

// Message with custom ID and description
t.id("message.id", "description")`Default message`
``