How to reliably check (pre-)translation status before downloading translations?

[finebel]

Hi, I'm in the process of integrating Crowdin into CI/CD. The goal is to have an automatic Crowdin sync without manual intervention from the developer.
The basic flow is like this (triggered when source files are changed):

1. Upload sources to Crowdin
2. Wait until automatic pre-translation is done
3. Download updated translations

For 2 I'm using crowdin status translation like below:

while ! crowdin status translation --branch <branch> --fail-if-incomplete; do
  sleep 2
done

This is necessary, since pre-translation for new source uploads runs asynchronously - i.e. downloading translations immediately after uploading new sources doesn't (always) return the correct/updated translations.
Unfortunately, with the above script for 2 there is an edge case that breaks this approach. When you have a branch that only deletes source strings (the Crowdin UI shows "Nothing to translate" for this branch), crowdin status translation --branch <branch> --fail-if-incomplete always fails because the translation progress is reported as 0%.

Question 1:
Is this the intended behaviour? If yes, is there any other way how one could check whether the asynchronous source upload operation is completed?
Unfortunately, crowdin status translation --branch <branch> also reports 0% when you add new source strings but none of them were translated yet. So it's also not possible to check for 0 and then skip waiting.

Question 2:
Based on a couple of tests, it seems like translations for deleted source strings are removed when downloading translations immediately after uploading sources (i.e. leaving out 2). So it seems removing source strings is a synchronous operation. Is this correct? Or could it be that the translation progress is reported as 100% (i.e. crowdin status translation --branch <branch> --fail-if-incomplete succeeds) but not all deletions are processed yet?

EDIT:

If yes, is there any other way how one could check whether the asynchronous source upload operation is completed?

Ok, I guess it would be possible to trigger the pre-translation explicitly via API/api-client and then observe the status as outlined in https://github.com/crowdin/crowdin-api-client-js/blob/master/EXAMPLES.md#pre-translate-project. Unfortunately, switching from the CLI to calling the API directly involves quite some work...

[andrii-bodnar]

Hi @finebel!

When you have a branch that only deletes source strings (the Crowdin UI shows "Nothing to translate" for this branch), crowdin status translation --branch --fail-if-incomplete always fails because the translation progress is reported as 0%.

This is the current API behavior, and it has always been this way. I doubt it can be changed.

So it seems removing source strings is a synchronous operation. Is this correct?

Yes.

---

It is possible to run pre-translation explicitly and synchronously. Please take a look at discussion crowdin/github-action#280, which contains a lot of useful information on the matter.

BTW, what do you use for your CI/CD? With GitHub Actions, it's possible to use webhooks to trigger the workflow. This makes the status check in a loop redundant. See this guide for more details - https://store.crowdin.com/github-actions-webhook. In this case, one workflow is responsible for uploading sources, and another is responsible for downloading translations.

[finebel]

Thanks for the answer! 🙌

It is possible to run pre-translation explicitly and synchronously.

Do you mean that crowdin pre-translate runs synchronously? Because in crowdin/github-action#280 (reply in thread) you wrote the following:

Although it is not possible to run crowdin pre-translte asynchronously, I think it would be possible to run this job with some short timeout and finish the workflow. Then, listen for the "Project if fully translated" Webhook, for example.

If crowdin pre-translate runs synchronously, then I don't understand why it's required to listen to the webhook event. The key is that we need to wait with downloading the translations until the newly uploaded sources are properly translated (this is what I mean with "synchronously").

One additional issue with the "Project fully translated" webhook would probably be, that it doesn't contain any branch information (i.e. we would need to download translations for all Crowdin branches).

Project fully translated webhook

So we would need to use something like "File fully translated" (there you have a branchId) but this would then (potentially) trigger multiple times (when you edit strings in multiple files), I assume?

BTW, what do you use for your CI/CD? With GitHub Actions, it's possible to use webhooks to trigger the workflow.

We use Bitrise but I think they also have some options to trigger a workflow based on a webhook event.

---

Anyway, I think we can use an approach where we keep the while loop with --fail-if-incomplete and then check after some timeout (e.g. 10 seconds) whether the status is still at 0 %. If it is, we can assume that strings were only deleted and therefore break out of the loop. This is obivously not ideal but probably the simplest solution for now.

[andrii-bodnar]

The pre-translate command is always synchronous. In the aforementioned discussion, I was thinking about how to make it asynchronous as a workaround. The webhook trigger is not required by default.

[finebel]

Ok, thanks for the info. Good to know!