create user and set its frontend language via php-script

Question

The code below (modified from another post) works fine for me to create a user. But how do you set the new user's frontend language? In the code below, the lines

'frontend-language'=>'de-DE',

'frontend-language'=>$params['frontend-language'],

are how I've unsuccessfully tried to achieve it.

define( '_JEXEC', 1 );
define('JPATH_BASE', dirname(__FILE__) );//this is when we are in the root
define( 'DS', DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR );

require_once ( JPATH_BASE .DS.'includes'.DS.'defines.php' );
require_once ( JPATH_BASE .DS.'includes'.DS.'framework.php' );

$app = JFactory::getApplication('site');
$app->initialise();

$params = array(
    'name'=>'test1',
    'username'=>'test1_user',
    'email'=>'mailtest1@example.com',
    'password'=>'test',
    'frontend-language'=>'de-DE',
);

$udata = array(
    'name'=>$params['name'],
    'username'=>$params['username'],
    'password'=>$params['password'],
    'email'=>$params['email'],
    'groups'=>array(2), // set the usergroup(s) here (id)
    'frontend-language'=>$params['frontend-language'],
);

$user = new JUser;

try{
    echo '<pre>';
    echo 'Bind user data: ';
    var_dump($user->bind($udata));         

    echo 'Save user data: ';
    var_dump($user->save());

    //echo 'Testing login: ';
    //var_dump( $app->login( array('username'=>$params['username'],'password'=>$params['password']) ) );

} catch (Exception $ex) {

    echo 'Exception: ',  $e->getMessage(), '\n';

}

Answer 1

Frontend language field is called language, not frontend-language. It also doesn't have its own column in the database. Instead it's JSON-encoded with other params and stored to params column.

Remove frontend-language element from $udata and instead add params array with language as key and selected language as value:

$udata = array(
    'name' => $params['name'],
    'username' => $params['username'],
    'password' => $params['password'],
    'email' => $params['email'],
    'groups' => array(2), // set the usergroup(s) here (id)
    'params' => array('language' => $params['frontend-language']),
);

Alternatively, you can use JUser::setParam() to set param values:

$user = new JUser;
$user->bind($udata);
$user->setParam('language', 'de-DE');
$user->save();