Hi everyone,
TLDR: Have you run into problems translating dynamic fields when building config flow forms for a Home Assistant integration? If so, how did you deal with it? I’d love to hear your experiences and ideas for solutions to address this. Here’s my proposal.
I’m reaching out to the community, especially integration developers, about a limitation in Home Assistant’s config flow form implementation regarding translations for dynamic fields.
The problem
In the Data Entry Flow forms (Config / Options / Subentry flows), it is currently not possible to translate dynamic fields or sections (for which the keys are only known at runtime) because of how the form data_schema keys are directly used to map the translations from the strings.json.
Let me give you a concrete example from my own integration work. I was building a config flow where the form fields are generated dynamically: I needed to show a section for each device the user has with a title depending on the device name. Here is what it should look like with 2 devices for example:
But with the current implementation, I can’t translate the fields inside the sections and do any interpolation for the sections title.
What I’m proposing
I’ve put together a GitHub architecture discussion to address this: basically, let us map dynamic field keys to static translation keys using a translation_field_mappings dictionary with placeholders used for interpolation. This should make it possible to get proper translations for those dynamic fields.
Looking for your experiences and thoughts
- Have you run into this problem before? What was your use case?
- Did you find a workaround? How did you handle it?
- Does my idea sound helpful, or is there a better way to tackle this?
- Any gotchas or concerns I might not have thought of?
Would love to hear how others have handled this or if you’ve just been annoyed by it too! If you’ve got suggestions for a better approach, I’m all ears.
Thanks for reading!