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Feedback Search should also search for message keys

Discussion in 'Localization Tools' started by kork, Jun 2, 2020.

  1. kork

    kork

    Joined:
    Jul 14, 2009
    Posts:
    280
    When you use the search function in the asset tables dialog, the search only searches the actual text of the localization. While that is useful, the search should also search for the message key's text. This would be useful to find all strings that belong to a similar message key (e.g. to find all localizations that belong to a certain dialog).
     
  2. karl_jones

    karl_jones

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    May 5, 2015
    Posts:
    8,292
    Hi,
    What do you mean by message key's text?
    Is this metadata?
     
  3. kork

    kork

    Joined:
    Jul 14, 2009
    Posts:
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    Well it sort of is metadata. Every message has a key in it's table. While it's not really used that often as you have things like
    LocalizedString
    to refer to messages, it still is useful to give you an idea where a string is actually used - here in this example the key gives some indication at which part in a story the message will appear. This can be useful for the translator as context and it can also help to quickly find stuff that belongs to a certain story - if you can search for it of course.

    upload_2020-6-3_7-27-46.png

    I'm not sure if i'm using this the right way though. I come from an enterprise background where we use message bundles all the time but there the key is vital as it is used to refer to the message. Also there keys have some hierarchic name scheme, so it is easy to group things together that belong together, e.g. if you use a thing like babeledit or IntelliJ and you have keys that follow a structure, e.g
    user-properties.delete-property-dialog.title
    , you can get a nice tree outline of all of your messages:




    This gives you a great overview on what strings exist and provides some categorization and context to the translators. It also makes large text bundles much more manageable than a list of thousands of strings. So in an ideal world I would like to have this tree, but given what is there currently - a filter for the key would work as a crude replacement (e.g. i could search for all texts that share a part of a key). But maybe in games this stuff is done differently so I don't know if I am really asking a sensible thing here.
     
    Last edited: Jun 3, 2020
  4. karl_jones

    karl_jones

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    May 5, 2015
    Posts:
    8,292
    Ah ok, I understand.
    Supporting a hierarchic name scheme sounds plausible.
    We are working on some UX improvements so ill bring this up as a possible feature.
    Thanks