Lightning Equivalent to Dynamically get Field Label

Question

We are a multilingual org and need to be to dynamically translate field labels according to the running user's settings. Using Lightning:InputField is not always an option and we preferably do not want to use custom labels as we already have translations via the translation workbench.

For example to retrieve the label for Contact.FirstName we could use the following in Visualforce:

{!$ObjectType.Contact.fields.FirstName.Label}

Answer 1

As of today you cannot access field labels from a lightning component controller or markup and there is no visualforce equivalent. You can access a custom label from markup like that:

{!$Label.c.labelName}

But cannot access a field label. There is an idea you can upvote : Access sObject field lables from lightning component

Reference: Get field label in lightning component

Alternative Approach: You will have to fetch them from server side using apex.

Answer 2

I was recently working on an internal tool for this at the office. Effectively a declarative "service component" you can bring into your own Lightning Components to specify a bunch of field/object labels that you need to pull dynamically from Apex, with a few additional hooks to ensure that you can respond appropriately to the delay in getting these items loaded.

I don't think it's ready for sharing with the community yet and I'd need management approval but I could look into making it public at some point. Would there be a great deal of community interest in such a tool?

At the moment, the tool is capable of returning the following:

• Object:
  • Label (singular and plural)
  • Key prefix (e.g. 001 for Account)
  • Whether it is accessible / createable / deletable / queryable / updateable for the current user
• Record Types, indexed by Developer Name
  • Id
  • Name
  • Whether it is active
• Fields
  • Label
  • Type
  • Whether it is accessible / createable / updateable / nillable

What other information would you want out of a declarative Lightning solution to dynamic object/field references?