Overriding model attribute names using I18n - can't get this working

Question

I'm trying to override the string used to describe the 'login' attribute of my User model to be "User name" instead. I thought that this was set in vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/locale/en.yml. I've tried changing it here and in my config/locales/en.yml file, and in neither case does it work (i restart the server after every change).

In both cases it's done like this:

en:
...
  activerecord:
    attributes:
         user:
           login: User Name

When i test it out, eg having f.label :login in my new user form, it comes out as "Login" not "User Name". Am i labouring under some fundamental error about how this stuff works, or is it genuinely not working? Either way, can anyone tell me how to fix it? thanks, max

Answer 1

In case if any of you have trouble the translation aren't loaded, I debugged like this:

First I use the script in https://stackoverflow.com/a/10211540/474597 to setup logging. Then as I run the server and render the pages, I can see in that log the keys used to get the translations. Then I can check if the keys I use are correct or not.

---

One pitfall is that, the first key isn't necessarily the key they will use. I have seen cases where it loads the correct key, and then looks for another key which does not have translation, resulting in the English translation. I had to put the translation in those two keys.

For example: my Foo has_many Bar, and Bar has_many Duu, and Duu has a price column. In order to translate that price column, I have to have the following for it to work:

  activerecord:
    attributes:
      'foo/bar/duu':
        price: "price"

Even though the log has this:

:duu
:"activerecord.attributes.duu.text"
:"activerecord.errors.models.duu.attributes.text.blank"
:"activerecord.errors.models.duu.blank"
:"activerecord.errors.messages.blank"
:"errors.attributes.text.blank"
:"errors.messages.blank"
:"activerecord.attributes.foo/bars/duus.text"

Answer 2

I'm answering this here on request of someone... I did fix this and didn't update my question, sorry. I was on the right lines in my question but didn't have the right "path" down to the keys: the names of fields, as they are displayed, are called "labels" and they have their own section outside of the :activerecord part of the yaml tree.

The correct way to do it is

en:
  user:
    labels:
      login: "User Name"
      email: "Email Address"

where "user" is a lowercased model name and login and email are fields.