Multilingual redirects broken, add optional target language

[giancarlosotelo]

Problem
At the moment the redirect module is not working as intended for a variety of multilingual scenarios.
For example when we create a redirect with a redirect language in the source path, it is not working at all, it doesn’t redirect. This is only working with the default language.

Another problem is with the target path. When we create a redirect to an any path it always ends up on a url with the language prefix that is set in the config, That leads to a possible limitation. A node that have previously been saved with the wrong language ending up with an alias (people link to it) and then we fix the language... The alias changes and there should be a redirect from the old language version to the new one. I fear this either leads to broken redirect target or no redirect at all. Simply said: Cross language redirects are impossible.

Proposal
Now a proposed solution to fix the second problem is adding an optional target language selector. With this the redirect will always end up on the selected target path even if the language is set to another.

See screenshot proposal for adding another selector with the target language. We need some feedback to decide what is better to solved this critical problem.

The target language “Not specified” should be altered to “- Source language -”.
The source language “- Not specified -” and other special items should be clarified such as “- All languages -” or so. Users don’t understand the implication of these values otherwise.

To be discussed
Selecting a language will trigger ajax update and will update the domain and language prefix with the path input. Still i’m not too happy about this uncommon pattern to output text just before the form text field. We should discuss this with an UX expert.

Also with the target, we should similarly make the user aware how a target path is interpreted (and output domain and language context for relative targets).

[mirodietiker]

The post above is the result of our discussion, so i also vote for this direction. :-)

[Berdir]

Need to read this when I have a bit more time.

Two notes:

a) The language selector is the standard language widget, so we'll either need to alter that or write our own widget.
b) Before we do anything more, we need to complete #50. There are tests, some fixes from me to make it work, continue that and merge it, that will make the source language option actually work.

[giancarlosotelo]

I made some manual tests with the recent merge of #50. I have the following.

About the first problem.

• Creating a redirect with the option language not specified.
  • from /test to /node ends in node, it works fine as always.
  • from /es/test ends to /es/node, it works fine because no language was specified.
  • from /fr/test ends to /fr/node, same as before.
• Creating a redirect with an specific language.
  • from /test ends in 404 error because is not the selected language.
  • from /fr/test ends in /fr/node
    So I think this behavior is the correct one because we are just specifying the redirect for that language.

About the second problem is more complex but

'When we create a redirect to an any path it always ends up on a url with the language prefix that is set in the config'

This is not applied anymore because as I said we are only redirecting to the specific language when is selected. So we don't have the other limitation because we can edit this specific language anytime(?)

Maybe I am forgetting something because this is one month old :p

[agoradesign]

I saw in our current project, a multilingual D8 site, that Redirect currently is not able to handle language path prefixes.

setup to reproduce

• Install German and English, both with language path prefixes ('de', 'en')
• Install Content Translation and marked content type "page" as translatable
• Install Redirect and at least activate "nonclean_to_clean" config setting.
• Create a node in German and set alias to "/test-deutsch" (node id 1)
• Translate the node to English and set alias to "/test-english"

Expected result

• Enter "yoursite/de/node/1" in your browser => now we should get redirected to "/de/test-deutsch", but you won't
• Do the same with "yoursite/en/node/1" and you get the same result.

cause

When we debug into the redirectNormalizeAliases() function of RedirectRequestSubscriber class, that $path = $event->getRequest()->getPathInfo() in line 235 as well as the subsequent call to $system_path = $this->aliasManager->getPathByAlias($path) in line 240 all return the path including language prefix (eg. "/de/node/1").
But in the next line, the alias manager won't find anything, if you call the function including the prefix ($alias = $this->aliasManager->getAliasByPath($system_path, $this->languageManager->getCurrentLanguage()->getId());)
As a result, you won't get redirected. But if you call getAliasByPath('/node/1', 'de') instead, you'd get the desired return value and further get redirected to the aliased url.

solution

All we have to do is, to clean up the $path variable from the language prefix, before we set the $system_path variable. The \Drupal\language\Plugin\LanguageNegotiation\LanguageNegotiationUrl class already has the right function for this:
processInbound

I have made a patch, which is a little bit sloppy, but works perfectly for me. Unfortunately I still have problems with the Plugin API, when it comes to manually instantiate and call plugins. In this case, I tried to load the plugin via \Drupal\language\LanguageNegotiationMethodManager. However, I didn't get a fully instantiated plugin, the language manager was apparantly missing. So I gave up and copied the content of this function into an own one. This works great for me. I haven't tested it in a single-language site, but I don't believe, that this would cause any problems. So here's the link to my patch: http://downloads.agoradesign.at/drupal/patches/redirect/fix_multilingual_redirects.patch

[danielbeeke]

The patch from agoradesign is working for me.

[kristofferwiklund]

Patch works great for us also. Added a pull request with it.

[charginghawk]

FYI, as this repo is deprecated, this issue has been continued at: https://www.drupal.org/node/2704213