How to change Loco project settings

If you have permission to modify a project, you can access these settings from the :cog icon: that appears next to the project name in your main dashboard. The window that opens contains two tabs with the following options

Basic info

These basic properties are mainly just for display purposes.

• Short name
  This is the "slug" that appears in your project dashboard URLs. It's best to leave this if any of your fellow team members have bookmarked project links. Leaving this empty will cause it to be re-generated from the full (friendly) project name.

• Friendly name
  This is the full name of your project. It's really just a label and you can change it any time without altering the short name if need be.

• Description
  This is optional information about the project for displaying in your main dashboard listing. It serves no other purpose than to tell your team members what the project is for.

• Web address
  Entering a web address is optional. If you're a developer, note that this option affects our API referrer checks.

Source text

This tab contains project-level settings relating to the source language. Individual locales are managed from the "Locales" tab on the right hand side of the project's "Manage" view.

Source locale

This is the default language that you'll be translating from. You can change this to any other locale in your project, but be aware that switching source mid-project can cause confusion, especially if you switch it to a locale with untranslated strings.

If you just want to modify the source locale's properties (e.g. to change "en-GB" to "en") you can do that elsewhere - see modifying locales.

When source text changes:

These options control what happens when you modify the default language text of an asset.

• Flag translations as fuzzy
  With this option enabled translations will be marked fuzzy if the source language is changed. This flag indicates that the translations may no longer be accurate and should be reviewed. The flag is automatically cleared the next time a fuzzy translation is saved.

Developer settings

These are more advanced configuration options that change the way your project behaves.

Asset IDs

Asset IDs are enabled by default, but you may wish to disable them if your platform uses source text as a unique key. Disabling this option makes it simpler to work with Loco when IDs are not required, for example when working with Gettext.

The options to customize ID auto-formatting are applied when Loco automatically generates an Asset ID from source text. This formatting does not affect ID values you've specifically set yourself.

• Preferred case:
  The text "Café" would produce "Cafe", "cafe" or "CAFE" depending on whether you prefer to keep the original letter case or convert the ID to lower or upper case.

• Length:
  IDs will be truncated to this maximum length before being suffixed to maintain uniqueness. For example the strings "Hello World" and "Hell on Earth" would produce "Hell" and "Hell-2" if you entered a maximum length of 4 characters. It's recommended to keep this value large enough to identify your strings uniquely, but no larger than necessary.

• Separator:
  The single character you enter here defines the 'separator' which replaces all non-alphanumeric characters. The default is a hyphen, such that "foo bar" would produce "foo-bar".

• Allow punctuation:
  This field permits non-alphanumeric punctuation characters in addition to the separator character. For example: the text "You have %s messages!" would produce "You-have-s-messages" unless you allow the percent symbol, in which case it would produce "You-have-%s-messages".

Note that auto-generated IDs will always be reduced to a single line of ASCII characters. If you need multi-byte characters in your Asset IDs, you should maintain your own custom IDs and avoid automatic ID generation completely.

Asset aliases

Here you can define custom identifiers in addition to the primary asset ID. The aliases you define here are available as custom properties of all new and existing assets in your project. For more detailed information on this feature, please see the developer documentation.

Formatting

The string formatting syntax of your assets is detected automatically according to this setting. If you enter multiple values, the first syntax that validates will be used. If no syntax validates, the asset is left unformatted.

• Syntax detection is only performed on source text, and only when it changes. You can set the printf property manually on individual assets if needed.

• The default syntax for all new projects is ICU MessageFormat. This is a safe default, and is multi-platform. If you're not working with ICU, you probably won't notice.

• Note that any formatting defined by file imports takes priority. For example, importing formatted strings from an Android XML file will always set the asset's format to "java".

Validation

Formatting errors are shown in the editor by default, but translations are not flagged automatically when they fail validation.

Here you can enable auto-flagging, by selecting a flag from the dropdown list. Every time a translation is saved, it will be checked for errors and flagged if any are found. Existing flags against a translation will take precedence, unless they are also an automatically applied flag.

Legacy options

• Enable simple locale codes with underscore
  Loco uses standard language tags by default, but if you have an old project or just prefer the legacy style, you can change it here. This option was added to ease migration from the old to the new style when it was introduced in 2015. We don't recommend it.

• Legacy key collision handling
  If you see this option, it means your project has (or had) overlapping dot-separated IDs, (like "foo" and "foo.bar"). This causes problems when exporting nested structures, and Loco's handling of conflicts was previously wrong. Read about key collisions and see the full notice about migrating legacy behaviour.