Rails plugin: navigation helper

This is absolutely great. I find myself doing the same thing over and over. Not sure why it didn’t occur to me that this would be a good plugin.

I haven’t checked out the code yet or anything, but the idea itself seems great. I love that you even thought to include the authorized tabs and active tab overrides.

Thinking about this (again, without looking at code and only thinking about future expansion), it might make sense to have the primary navigation array also be hashes. i.e.

1
2

navigation [:home => {:tip => 'Link to home page', :hover => 'Start Here'}, 
:about => {:tip => 'More about us', :hover => 'Learn More'}]

I love your concise syntax, but having an option of something like this could really open up the flexibility. The best thing about this would be the potential to do nested drop down menus (which I tend to need more often than not) with something like:

1
2

navigation [:home => {:navigation => [:photos, :posts, :settings]}, 
:about, :admin => {:navigation => [:moderate, :users]}]

Again, this is not at all a criticism. I’m just so excited by the idea that I can’t stop making it more and more complicated. It’s a problem I have. :)

I get your point about needing both as being redundant, I was just trying to make it as ridiculous as possible.

WRT to hashes, in Ruby 1.9 all hashes are ordered and in Edge Rails there is an OrderdHash class included in active support.

http://www.culann.com/2008/01/rails-goodies-activesupportorderedhash

Well, I’m of the opinion that there’s no need to replace the link with text on the “current” tab. Also, since this plugin matches the current tab at the controller level, several actions could result in that controller being the “current” one. I like to be able to always click the tab again to get to the default page, rather than providing a series of breadcrumbs to backtrack.

But it wouldn’t be all that hard to modify the plugin itself, and feel free to do so. You could also use javascript to do this:

////
// prototype
document.observe("dom:loaded", function() {
  $$('ul.nav_bar li.current').each(function(e) {
    e.update(e.down().innerHTML);
  });
});

////
// jQuery
$(document).ready(function() {
  $('ul.nav_bar li.current').each(function(i) {
    this.html(this.children('a:first').text());
  });
});

That’s untested, of course. Admittedly, though, I’d modify the plugin over a javascript solution, I just thought I’d mention it.

Oh, and I’m glad you found the plugin useful :-)

Well even better / compliant: http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/

Ryan,

alright – thanks for letting me know. I need it kinda right away, too … and will implement it one way or another over the next couple days. In case you wanna do it together, let me know :)

-J

Yeah, minor problem with your routes. You need:

1
2
3

map.home       '/home',    :controller => ...
map.about      '/about',   :controller => ...
map.contact_me '/contact', :controller => ...

From that, Rails will build helpers for you based on the map.[whatever] part. So for map.home you’ll get home_path, home_url, etc. In your case, though, you’re getting home_path_path because you’re including “_path” in the route definition. Try omitting the “_path” part in routes.rb and see if that helps.

Let me know.

Ryan, what about situations where you need to pass a parameter to the named route. For example:

user_path(@user)

How would it work here?

Hi,

I would like to specify the text of the link instead of the default of the section name. Will appreciate any help on how to tweak this plugin to achieve this.

thanks.

Great plugin Ryan, thanks!

I made a very minor update to enable me to be able to set the current tab at the action level, not only at the controller level…so I figured I’d share.

In navigation_helper.rb, replace…

1
2
3
4

def current_tab(tab=nil)
    @current_tab = tab unless tab.nil?
    @current_tab ||= controller.controller_name.to_sym
end

With…

1
2
3
4

def current_tab(tab=nil)
    @current_tab = tab unless tab.nil? || @current_tab
    @current_tab ||= controller.controller_name.to_sym
end

Now, I can set the current tab for individual controller actions like so:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

class SiteController < ApplicationController

  def about
    SiteController::current_tab :about_us
  end

  def index
    SiteController::current_tab :home
  end

end

Ok sweet, I was trying to figure out a way to do it without modifying the code, making it easier to upgrade if there are future versions of the plugin, but that didn’t occur to me (I’m new to Rails).

Thanks again, this plugin is definitely making my life easier right now.

@gaveeno:

Well, if I were to approach this, here’s how it would look from a usage standpoint:

1

<% navigation [:section_one => [:subsection_one, :subsection_two], :section_two] %>

Considering that, you would have to check the links being passed into the navigation method. While looping, if you come across an array, you could do a recursive call to build the sub-navigation.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

# to help get the point across
def navigation(links)  
  links.each do |link|
    link_item_for(link) and next unless link.is_a?(Array)
    navigation(link)
  end
end

Of course that’s just pseudo-code, but you get the idea. You’ll probably have to modify the error handling, too, as I’m fairly strict about what gets passed in (considering the ability to add subtitles and such).

Hopefully that gave you some direction. I’ve been contacted a number of times about the sub-navigation issue, but until I have a direct need for it, I probably won’t account for that. However, that’s the beauty of github!

Let me know how it goes.