Internationalization with mobx and react-intl

A library to use react-intl along with a mobx store for the selected locale with typescript support.

Example

Since an example is worth a thousand words.

You can see this example running on Stackblitz

import React, { Component } from 'react';
import { render } from 'react-dom';
import { Provider, inject, observer } from "mobx-react"; 
import { MobxIntlProvider, LocaleStore } from "mobx-react-intl"; 
import {addLocaleData, injectIntl, FormattedMessage} from "react-intl";
import enLocale from 'react-intl/locale-data/en';
import deLocale from 'react-intl/locale-data/de';
addLocaleData([...deLocale, ...enLocale]);


const translations = {
  en: {
    hello: "Hello", 
    world: "World"
  }, 
  de: {
    hello: "Hallo", 
    world: "Wereld"
  }
}

// Internationalization
const localeStore = new LocaleStore("en", translations);

const store = {
    locale: localeStore, // The locale store has to be called locale. 
};

const _Home = ({intl: {formatMessage}, locale}) => <div>
    <h1>{formatMessage({id: "hello"})}</h1>
    <FormattedMessage id="world" />
    <br/>
    <select value={locale.value} onChange={(event) => locale.value = event.target.value}>
        <option value="de">Deutsch</option>
        <option value="en">English</option>
    </select>
</div>
const Home = inject("locale")(injectIntl(observer(_Home)));

const App = () => <div>
    <Provider {...store}> 
        <MobxIntlProvider>
            <Home />
        </MobxIntlProvider>
    </Provider>
</div>;

render(<App />, document.getElementById('root'));

I18n mobx store

LocaleStore is a mobx store that contains the locale data and persists the locale to the browser LocalStorage (if it exists).

The store expects the default locale and the translations for all supported locales as arguments.

Intl Provider

MobxIntlProvider.js: Creates the I18n provider for mobx. Note that it relies on IntlProvider from react-intl.

This component has the same interface as IntlProvider except that the locale and messages attributes are injected through mobx.

Using locale data in other stores.

It is possible to also use the i18n without being in the react scope. For example when initializing a store that needs locale data, just pass the locale store as a prop. You can see that a formatMessage method is implemented in the LocaleStore for this case.

Example

A running example with some file structure is provided in examples/simple-app.

Run the example locally:

To run this create-react-app project, run the following commands (yarn can be replaced by npm)

yarn install
yarn start

Introduction

To have internationalization (i18n) working with react, mobx and react-intl, we need to:

1. Create a store for the i18n data (locale used and locale data)
2. Uhe use a custom provider to provide internationalization from the mobx store.
3. Inject the provider to UI components.
4. Use the provided code.

I18n translations.

We create two files to maintain locale data:

./translations/en.js and ./translations/de.js provide translations for English and German.

Language Switcher

./Toolbar.js is the component used to switch from one language to another.

Home

./Home.js is a UI component that uses i18n to display texts.

Application initializer

In ./App.js we finally wrap up all components.

The app is initialized initialized with the Provider and shows the Home component.