Rails plugin: navigation helper

You know, I was back and forth on the the hash or array thing. My original plan was (and this was concerning subtitles, but use your imagination) to do something like this with the subtitles:

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navigation({:home => 'Start Here', :about => 'Learn More'})

The section/subtitle association is a lot more obvious that way. But there’s a problem with that: a Hash is an unordered container. So then I thought, no biggy, if a Hash is passed in, I’ll just instantiate a new dictionary object, which will preserve the order.

Well, I would have had to do something like this:

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sections = Dictionary[:home, 'Start Here', :about, 'Learn More']

# then this would work...
sections[:home] # => 'Start Here'

But the fact that I had to still pass section, subtitle, section, subtitle to the dictionary class (same as the array) sort of turned me off to that idea. In the end, I decided to just use a plain array instead of an array/hash combo.

Personally, I don’t think visible subtitles AND hover text is applicable. It seems like at that point I’d be adding options just for the sake of adding options. But yes, this plugin could definitely be extended a bit more to cover all sorts of other navigation needs.

Great plugin!

I was glad to see that it uses class rather than id. I needed more than one so I did something like this:

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navigation [:first, :second], :authorize => [:second]
navigation [:third, :fourth], :authorize => [:third], :with => :some_auth_method

I didn’t see any support for link_to_unless_current did I miss it? I did notice class=”current” for styling.

Thanks for the plugin.

Hello there,

thanks for the useful plugin! Quick question: is it possible to add sub-elements of a navigation element like e.g. in this example:

http://qrayg.com/experiment/cssmenus/

So you can specify sub-navigation elements of each of the navigation [:home, :about, :admin].. elements… or no subelements and the behaviour is just like the current one.

Hope that makes sense :)

-J

Sorry, no sub-elements for the navigation helper. It’s a different type of navigation from a menu-driven approach. It provides more of a tabbed interface. But maybe that’s an idea for a navigation_menu plugin? I could actually use that on a project I’m working on… so who knows… maybe I’ll write it (I’ll post about it here if I do).

Hi Ryan,

I keep on having “undefined method `home_path’ for #” error when I add you navigation bar to my home page.

Am I doing something wrong here ?

<%= navigation [:home, :about, :contact_me] %>

I have added the following lines in my routes.rb file :

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map.home_path 'home', :controller => 'home'
map.about_path 'home', :controller => 'home'
map.contact_me_path 'home', :controller => 'home'

Any idea ?

Thanks Ryan, it solved my problem. I did know that Rails was building _url helpers but not _path ones.

That works great, thanks for the support and the plugin !

Kris -

For my needs, I usually have the tab mapped to a controller’s index action (since it’s the default), which can act as sort of a “dashboard-ish” type of representation (for users it may be the most recently registered users, or whatever). So in your example, I’d have the tab be :users (which would map to the default index action of the users_controller), and use current_user (either via restful_authentication or my own implementation) to represent anything I needed to do that was user-centric.

But I understand that you may have just been using that as an example, and the user you’re referencing above may not be yourself (ie, current_user). In either case, I think that may be getting a little too specific for the plugin, but feel free to hack away if you want to add support for that type of thing.

Never mind,

I managed to do what I wanted. Basically in the construct method where the subtitles are added to the link I am doing

link = link_to(content_tag(:span, SUBTITLES[section]), send("#{section.to_s.downcase}_path"), :title => SUBTITLES[section])

therefore getting the span tag as part of the link which is what I needed.

Cheers!.

Thanks, I’m glad you find it useful. Regarding your issue with setting the current tab from an action, here’s another option (without modifying any code):

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class SiteController < ApplicationController
  def about
    self.class.current_tab :about_us
  end

  def index
    self.class.current_tab :home
  end
end

Hey Ryan, any idea what I should do to modify this so that I can have subsections (menu items)?

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<ul class="nav_bar">
    <li class="">
        <a href="/section1">Section 1</a>
        <ul>
            <li>
                <a href = "/section1/subsection1>Subsection 1</a>
            </li>
            <li>
                <a href = "/section1/subsection2>Subsection 2</a>
            </li>
        </ul>
    </li>
</ul>

Thanks for the pointers Ryan! I’ll give it a shot and let you know if I come up with something workable…though I assure you it won’t be as elegant as the native code.

@Hans -

Glad you like the plugin.

I’ll have to look into the MenuItemController issue you were having. I haven’t had that problem, but I can see why it would occur. Your underscore solution is more than likely the way to go, since “MenuItem”.downcase => “menuitem” wouldn’t be consistent with RESTful routes. Thanks for catching that.

As far as the :authorize option goes, the idea there is to simply support navigation for a public interface, as well as a “logged in” interface, all in the same helper. It wasn’t designed to handle a sophisticated permissions system.

However, if you wanted to tackle that yourself, you would have to restructure the navigation helper to accept a Hash of options (the latest version accepts a Hash for non-conventional routes, so use that as a guide). And when building out the actual links, you would need to check for a :role option, and if present, only concatenate the link to the list if the current user has that role. Hopefully that makes sense.

And for your final concern, it sounds like you’re wanting nested menus. I’ve done this myself in an application or two, but it never felt generic enough to make its way into the plugin. I added a second controller class method, called navigation_for, that related to the current actions within the controller. You would simply define the display text for each action (defaults to the action name). And in the view, all that is needed was a <%= sub_navigation %> helper call, and the nested current tabs and such were handled automatically. So that’s one approach you could take.

I still have a minor urge to completely rewrite this plugin, and if I ever find the time (and/or motivation) to do so, I may consider some of these recurring interests that people bring up.

If you’re interested, all activity related to this or any new plugins would be on my github account. And thanks for the feedback!

Hello Hans,
I just tried to send you an email which bounced. I am very interested in your adaptation of Ryan’s code for nested menus and role_requirements plugin since I use both in my solution. Can you please post it somewhere?
Thanks.
Bharat

Hello Ryan,
I read your response to Hans. I am interested in the following part:
" … I added a second controller class method, called navigation_for, that related to the current actions within the controller. You would simply define the display text for each action (defaults to the action name). And in the view, all that is needed was a <%= sub_navigation %> helper call, and the nested current tabs and such were handled automatically. So that’s one approach you could take…."

Can you please elaborate on that with respect to your plugin on github? Pseudo code will be fine. I want to do the work and learn.
Thank you.
Bharat

Bharat -

I can try to elaborate a little more about how I handled the sub-menu, and hopefully you’ll be able to piece it together and fit it to your specific needs.

Basically, this plugin provides navigation at the controller level. The current tab is selected based on the current controller being accessed. Well, my view of the sub-menu is then at the action level.

To start things off, in my case, I always had a sub-menu for every main tab, so in my layout I chose the area where the sub-menu was to go, and used:

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<%= yield :sub_navigation %>

I’m assuming you’re familiar with content_for, here. Having that in place allows me to construct helper methods that will build the links and then use content_for to fill in the sub-menu. This let’s me call the helper anywhere, without requiring explicit placement within the layout/view.

1. The navigation_for class method

I added a class method (the same place the current_tab method is defined) to all controllers that allows me to setup sub-menu’s for that controller’s actions. So at the top of a controller, I might have this:

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navigation_for [:index, 'All Tasks', :new, 'New Task']

Essentially, all that method does is setup two arrays: one for the actions that are to be a part of the menu, and one for the text that is to be displayed for each of the actions. It then calls a before_filter to setup those arrays (via instance variables) to the view. The method looks something like this:

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# used to specify sub-navigation per controller
#
# Example:
# class DashboardController < ApplicationController
# navigation_for [:index, 'Stats', :welcome, 'Welcome']
# end
def navigation_for(items)
  before_filter do |klass|
    actions, texts = [], []
    
    items.each_with_index do |item, index|
      actions << item if item.is_a?(Symbol) && index.even?
      texts   << item if item.is_a?(String) && index.odd?
    end
    
    klass.send(:setup_sub_navigation, [actions, texts])
  end
end

The setup_sub_navigation helper just loads the actions and texts into instance variables so the view can use them.

2. The sub_navigation helper

Once things are setup, all I have to do then is call <%= sub_navigation %> as needed. And that method looks very similar to the <%= navigation ... %> helper, except instead of checking the controller name or current tab, it checks for the action name.

Also, if you take this approach, don’t forget to call content_for at the end of the sub_navigation helper. Something like this:

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content_for :sub_navigation do
  content_tag :ul, list_items, :class => 'sub_navigation'
end and return nil

Where the list_items are the constructed elements that you would have built above that line using the instance variables from setup_sub_navigation.

And that’s it. There are seriously a ton of different ways to set this up, but for my situation, I wanted this to be defined in the controller, so it became immediately clear which actions were a part of the sub-menu. Another nice side-effect is that it doesn’t bother the main controller-level tabs at all, so you can have two “tabs” highlighted at once.

Let me know if any of that is confusing and I can try to explain it a little more/better.

Hope that helps!

Hello Ryan,
Making excellent progress. I am trying to call the current_tab method conditionally in my users_controller as shown below:

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class UsersController < ApplicationController
  
  before_filter :login_required
  #current_tab(self.authorize_admin? ? :clients : :basic_data)
  current_tab :clients
  
  def index  
  end
  
  def edit
    self.class.current_tab :basic_data unless authorize_admin?
  end
  ...
end

This works. But when I try the uncommented version of conditional setting of current_tab, I get an error that authorize_admin? method is not defined. This method is defined in authentication.rb file in the lib directory in a module which is then mixed into the ApplicationController class. So I guess what I am asking is can an instance method be called from the current_tab method?

Bharat

Bharat -

I fixed the formatting :-)

And the answer to your question is no, you cannot. The current_tab method is a class/static method, and therefore has no idea (nor should it) about the “instance” of whatever controller you’re dealing with.

Maybe you could do something like this:

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class UsersController < ApplicationController
  before_filter :set_current_tab
  ...
  
protected
  def set_current_tab
    self.class.current_tab(authorize_admin? ? :clients : :basic_data)
  end
end

When you pass the method reference to a before filter, it executes at the instance level before each action, which means you would then have access to your authorize_admin? instance method.

Let me know if that solves your problem.

Peter -

I’m not sure why you’re getting that error. Have you restarted your app after plugin installation? If you’re using passenger, do: $> touch tmp/restart.txt. Otherwise just ctrl+c and script/server again.

The pugin mixes into ActionView::Base so you shouldn’t have any issues calling the navigation helper once it’s installed and your app has been restarted.

The only other thing in question: is your layout really named application.rhtml.erb? It could just be a typo, but proper syntax should be application.html.erb. In prior versions of Rails, the templates had a .rhtml extension (ruby html), but now things are in the form of name.type.renderer. Maybe .rhtml.erb still works, I don’t know. But it should be application.html.erb.

Hi Ryan,

I’ve decided to start from scratch…… I’m now getting a different error and I think its to do with my routes.rb. Below is the error I’m getting.

undefined method `home_path’

here is my routes.rb

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map.with_options(:controller => "about_us" ) do |about_us|
  about_us.connect "aboutus", :action => "index"
  #store_map.connect "/titles/buy/:id" , :action => "add_to_cart"
  #store_map.connect "/cart" , :action => "display_cart"
end
 	
map.with_options(:controller => "our_services" ) do |our_services|
  our_services.connect "ourservices", :action => "index"
end	

Anything you can spot I’m doing wrong?

Peter,

The missing home_path is because you haven’t defined a named route. To do that, you replace .connect with the name (“home”) in this case.

Also, map.connect '', ... is better represented with map.root ....

So, your “home” route should be like this:

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map.root :controller => 'home'

Then, use :root instead of :home in the navigation helper call:

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<%= navigation [:root, :about_us, :our_services] %>

Though you could define a “home” named route if you wanted:

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map.home '', :controller => 'home'

Chris & Ryan,

Thank you so much for your quick replys. It all works now. I’ll read up on routing seems like it can be quite powerful. Just got to work out how to do sub navigation now…

Peter -

Try changing this line, which looks like this:

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# lib/navigation.rb
self._current_tab ||= self.to_s.sub('Controller', '').downcase.to_sym

to this:

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# lib/navigation.rb
self._current_tab ||= self.to_s.sub('Controller', '').underscore.to_sym

I’m aware of the needed fix, but have yet to do it. It prevents controllers having multiple case (i.e. AboutUsController) from matching properly.

Let me know if that fixed your issue.

Peter -

I’m pretty sure that fix will work for you. But you should know, when you modify anything in lib/ or vendor/plugins, you need to restart your server for those changes to take effect (meaning you can’t just change it and then refresh the page). Try that, then let me know if you’re still having trouble. But again, I’m almost positive that will do the trick.