Dynamic staff portal doesn't work well in non-English languages

[Jane Sandberg]

I'm breaking this out from Linda's report in bug 2032753. Linda writes "The splash screen itself only shows the Evergreen logo, two (left and right) empty boxes (rectangles) with a pale green top and the middle box contains only a search box and a very basic search button (with no label)."

I did some small investigation of this issue. I found:

* The staff portal admin page (/eg2/[locale]/staff/admin/local/config/ui_staff_portal_page_entry) has a button to translate entries in the splash screen. However, it is always greyed out.
* If you add oils_persist:i18n="true" to the cusppe label and entry_text fields in fm_IDL.xml, the button becomes active, and you can use it to add entries to the config.i18n_core
* However, even with translations of these fields, the cs-CZ splash screen still looks the same: no labels, lots of empty rectangles.
* Regardless of the mechanism used to update labels for these entries, we should include these strings in our seed data so that individual sites don't have to do a lot of translation work just to get a splash screen working.

Marking this bug as high, since it makes the staff client look completely broken when used in a language other than English.

[Linda Jansova (skolkova-s)]

I'm not sure if it is likely to be useful for squashing this bug but there is also a locale.service.ts file (https://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=Evergreen.git;a=blob;f=Open-ILS/src/eg2/src/app/core/locale.service.ts;hb=4211fe0fb06ec94a29760d683a99813f9d9ee218)...

[Linda Jansova (skolkova-s)]

Using https://bugsquash3.mobiusconsortium.org/eg/staff/, I can confirm the splash page in Czech still does not work well.

What currently happens is that when one goes to the splash page, the correct version appears for a fraction of a second (I have managed to create a screenshot that shows it) and then the user is presented with a fully loaded splash page in English.

[Linda Jansova (skolkova-s)]

I'm adding the aforementioned screenshot.

[Eva Cerninakova (ece)]

I can confirm Linda's finding about the Czech screen described in comment #2. It appears for a fraction of a second, then it disappears. Finally, it is replaced by the English splash screen. So the Czech translation of default items of the splash screen are applied somewhere somehow, although it is not displayed correctly.  I have spotted the same behavior on our test server with EG 3.11 (however, having splash screen items visible at least in English is a little step ahead).

Ability to translate customized splash screen items to Czech would be desirable, however, I can confirm, that the "Apply translations" button is still grayed and is not usable (both, on our EG 3.11 test server, and on the https://bugsquash3.mobiusconsortium.org/ server).

[Stephanie Leary (stephanieleary)]

I've started a collab branch here: https://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/collab/sleary/lp2037426-i18n-staff-portal-content

[Mike Rylander (mrylander)]

This looks like 2 bugs to me.

First, the translatable flag (oils_persist:i18n="true") definitely is needed. That's how we say what fields can have translations, and seems like a simple oversight. Combined with Stephanie's template fixes to allow in-template translations, I think the actual l10n issues will be solved.

The second is something that I run into constantly on my dev systems (and therefore have been blaming myself for, but not tracking down), but now I think we may need to invoke Bill Erickson to assist with. Here, for some reason, the automatic redirect from the very top of the app's URI namespace to the splash page simple doesn't work sometimes. When that happens and you get a blank page, if you hit refresh (or press enter in the URL bar) you'll get the "Hey, you're probably looking for the staff client" page, with a link to ./staff/splash ... I don't know why that interstitial is there at all, instead of just pushing you on to the splash page, or why that doesn't load in some cases and needs a refresh to show up.

Bill, are your ears tingling? ;)

[Bill Erickson (berick)]

Mike, what you're describing sounds a lot like what I see when I get Angular route failures. They should be accompanied by a console error. It's been an issue for me on dev machines a lot too, sometimes in cases where it seems like it should not be happening.

It's never been an issue in production, where files change infrequently, so I've chalked it up as shifting sands and Ludicrous Speed caching for dev environments.

[Linda Jansova (skolkova-s)]

As Stephanie's patch from comment #5 should be loaded on Blake's bugsquash2 test server, I have checked whether the splash page looks fine now but it doesn't seem it does.

However, I was thinking that perhaps having something untranslated in POEditor might be the reason why I can still see English words on the splash page instead of the Czech ones.

So I have picked up two strings (the ones I thought would be the least common ones) and searched for them in POEditor. This search has yielded the following results:

Search For Patron By Name:
https://poeditor.com/projects/po_edit?per_page=20&id=218177&id_language=38&filter=&order=&search=Search+For+Patron+By+Name

Evergreen Documentation:
https://poeditor.com/projects/po_edit?per_page=20&id=218177&id_language=38&filter=&order=&search=Evergreen+Documentation

Both of these strings appear to be translated but I am not sure whether the strings themselves are actually correct as they contain quite some unusual characters (?).

[Eva Cerninakova (ece)]

Those "unusual" characters indicate a new empty space, and as I found out, for some reason, when translating, I did not include these characters in the translation of all splash page items (it doesn't apply to the column headers as there are no empty spaces). I'll fix those strings as soon as possible.

I cannot judge if missing white spaces are the reason why the splash page items are not displayed in Czech. However, I am sure that currently the translations are NOT TAKEN FROM POEDITOR, but from the webstaff template in Launchpad.

I know this because I checked if the splash page still behaves the same way as in previous versions. Specifically, if the Czech version is displayed for a fraction of second when loading the staff client, as described in comments #2 - 4. I also tried to make a screenshot. And while checking if all the items in Poeditor contain the whitespace error described above, I found that the translation of the "Item Search and Cataloging" string in the screenshot is different from what is shown in Poeditor (see the attachment).

[Linda Jansova (skolkova-s)]

Interesting, indeed! Yesterday, I was never quick enough to actually capture the Czech splash page which can only be seen for a fraction of a second, and so it never occurred to me that the translations actually might come from Launchpad rather than from POEditor... Perhaps it is a tiny little clue for this mystery :-)...

[Jennifer Pringle (jpringle-u)]

The brief appearance of the Czech splash page sounds like https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1983500 (redirect from AngularJS splash page to Angular Splash Page)

[Linda Jansova (skolkova-s)]

Thank you very much for pointing this out, Jennifer!

[Eva Cerninakova (ece)]

Just a note:
All the Czech translation strings for the Angular splash page have already been corrected in the POEditor.