I’d created another simple application in pylons, final step was to translate it from English to Polish.

I used the babel extractor recommended by pylons and that went really smooth.

My application have a language selector available anytime from menu.
I saw that even this switch worked very well for mako templates and string inside controllers,
it did not work when displaying my custom messages that i over rid in validators
and also did not work in my own custom validators that inherit from FancyValidator.
So i started to investigate this.

The first problem of not translating custom error messages in the regular formencode validators was easily being fixed by using lazy_ugettex method.

def _(s):
    #fix for translation error messages
    return lazy_ugettext(s)

This method allowed me to use lazy_ugettext to translate.
So now when in the validators your translating a string using _(‘this string is for translate’) method it’s actually wrapper for lazy_ugettext function.
Lazy translation is when you translate a string when it is accessed, not when the _() or other functions are called.

The second problem of translating custom error messages in your own validator was a bigger problem

I was looking for a solution for some time, and found a nice trick. You have to use your own
state_obj with static _() function. As example below for custom validation function.

class ValidLoginNames(formencode.validators.FancyValidator):

    messages = {'invalid_name':_('you cannot use %(username)s as login')}

    def validate_python(self, value, state):
        banned_names = ['admin', 'administrator', 'root']
        if value in banned_names:
            raise formencode.Invalid(self.message('invalid_name', state = State_obj, username = value), value, state)

#this is needed to translate the messages using _()
class State_obj(object):
    _ = staticmethod(_)

Those two trick now let’s you translate custom validators without a problem.

Recently i had to create a lot of models using declarative mode with sqlalchemy 0.5.5 It was very time consuming especially for large databases. I started to think about an automated solution.

Sqlalchemy have this auto load feature which fetches info about tables by itself. I wanted to use this somehow to generate a string which can be easily  copy/paste to database model definition script. So i started a little project to write auto  model generator for sql alchemy based on auto load feature in sqlalchemy.

The script  is not perfect but it works and save a huge amount of time just codding the models. In fact is was able to setup a 186 table database model in 15minutes with this script.

Well the script helped me a lot and now on when i have to load some new existing database or changes i use it all the time.

The documentation is inside the script i tried to write it so anybody could use it out of the box.

I tested it on 4 schema 200+ tables database and i worked quite good. This script still have to be polished but current functionality is enough for most users.

My script is going to be also a part of django-alchemy project started by my friend Lukasz Balcerzak. You can visit the project site @ http://code.google.com/p/django-alchemy/

I used it with Pylons application and Django with modded sqlalchemy. but it can be basically used in any app which uses sqlalchemy. I did not test it with mysql though,but it should work, just specify mysql as dialect.

You can download this script from sqlalchemy model generator