[SalesForce] Custom Labels – Working around their limits

My team is currently undergoing a discussion related to adding support for more languages using salesforce's custom labels. I've used custom labels before but am a little concerned about the limits.

You can create up to 5,000 custom labels for your organization, and they can be up to 1,000 characters in length. Custom labels from managed packages don’t count toward this limit.

If by any chance we run out of custom labels(we want to support many languages) is it sustainable to use managed packages to store them in there and work around the limit this way?

What should one do if there's a need for a label that is longer than 1000 chars? Is there a best practice related to this, maybe break it down in 2 separate labels?

Best Answer

Each label can have a translation for each language in your org. That means that if you have a label Hello_World, you can translate it in English, Spanish, Japanese, etc and it only counts as one label. 1,000 characters is approximately a decent paragraph of text (about 1/2 of a printed page), so if you need more than that, use more than one label. It is highly unlikely you'd need more than 5,000 labels, but if you absolutely needed to, you could use a managed package, but that would make your code base a bit more difficult to maintain.

Related Solutions

[SalesForce] possible to access custom labels dynamically

EDIT This is now possible! You can instantiate a dynamic visualforce component in Apex to get this.

public String getLabel(String myLabel ){
    Component.Apex.OutputText output = new Component.Apex.OutputText();
    output.expressions.value = '{!$Label.'+ myLabel + '}';
    return String.valueOf(output.value);
}

ORIGINAL ANSWER

No, you can't reference labels dynamically in apex. You can vote for this idea here. However, you can reference them dynamically from visualforce so you can put them on the page like so:

public class MyController
{
    public String mylabel{get; set;}

    public MyController()
    {
         mylabel='labelname';   
    }
}

<apex:page Controller="MyController">
    <apex:outputText> {!$Label[mylabel]} </apex:outputText>
</apex:page>

[SalesForce] Custom labels in javascript

This is a great question, and Custom Labels and the $Label global are the right place to start! Instead of evaluating Visualforce inside your JavaScript, you can do a little bit of JavaScript inside your Visualforce.

How do I get evaluated Visualforce variables into dumb static JavaScript?

Load your Custom Labels into the platform using the normal interface,

Create what I like to call a "JavaScript bridging component" that loads before your script, like so:

<script>
    window.$Label = window.$Label || {};
    $Label.MyError = '{!JSENCODE($Label.MyError)}';
    $Label.MyPrompt = '{!JSENCODE($Label.MyPrompt)}';
    $Label.MyMessage = '{!JSENCODE($Label.MyMessage)}';
</script>

Now in your javascript (in a static resource) use the variables just as if they were VF without {!}

<script src="{!URLFOR($Resource.ScriptZip, '/my.js')}">
    //NOTE: this example code is for clarity,
    //really he lives in the static resource
    function errorHandler() {
        console.log($Label.MyError);
        alert($Label.MyMessage);
    }
</script>

vf-js-bridging-component

This is in the spirit of the platform: there is no need to interpret any variation on the token names and you can pluck the values straight out in your JavaScript without inventing anything :-)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[SalesForce] possible to access custom labels dynamically

[SalesForce] Custom labels in javascript

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