[Exist-open] Best way to organize multilingual resources in database ?

[Stéphane S. <ste...@ep...>]

Hi,

I would like to manage multilingual resources in a web application done with eXist and I am seeking for an advice on how to organize the database resources and collections, please apologize me if this list is the wrong place for such discussions.

Basically, if there is a resource "mydoc.xml" inside a collection /db/data containing a <Doc>...</Doc> to be stored in two languages, I see two options :

Option 1 : create a single resource with two "forks" under a common root (e.g. AnyLanguage)

<AnyLanguage>
 <Doc xml:lang="en">...</Doc>
 <Doc xml:lang="fr">...</Doc>
</AnyLanguage>

Option 2: create two collections (en and fr) and store two documents (this also applies to full hierarchies of multilingual resources)

collection /db/data/en contains mydoc.xml that contains <Doc xml:lang="en">...</Doc>
collection /db/data/fr contains mydoc.xml that contains <Doc xml:lang="fr">...</Doc>

Simply considering querying data, I guess with option 1 one would have to write :

let $lang := 'en'
return collection('/db/data')/AnyLanguage/Doc[@xml:lang = $lang]//{my-path-expression}

whereas using option 2 that would be something like:

let $lang := 'en'
return collection(concat('/db/data/', $lang)//{my-path-expression}

I am wondering if there are some hidden drawbacks in using one option or the other (performance, sustainability, etc.) ? 

Can anybody with experience in this regards could give me an advice ? How do you manage this in your applications ?

Thanks in advance,

Stéphane S.
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