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Breadcrumbs in Ruby on Rails

I'm slightly insecure about my breadcrumb solution. Names and links are defined in each controller action:

<a href="http://localhost:3000/">Home</a>
<% if defined? @l1_link %>
  > <a href="<%= @l1_link%>"><%= @l1_name %></a>
  <% if defined? @l2_link %>
    > <a href="<%= @l2_link%>"><%= @l2_name %></a>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

This way I can use:

@l1_link = user_path()

Question: As I am not that smart - could this kind of system lead to desaster somewhere down the road? Is this (grossly) inefficient?

like image 233
Michael Schmitz Avatar asked Feb 17 '10 12:02

Michael Schmitz


2 Answers

Breadcrumbs menu are a recurrent pattern in most Rails applications. To solve this issue, I created and released a plugin called breadcrumbs_on_rails.

You define your breadcrumbs in the controller

class MyController

  add_breadcrumb "home", root_path
  add_breadcrumb "my", my_path

  def index
    # ...

    add_breadcrumb "index", index_path
  end

end

and you render them in your view.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
  <title>untitled</title>
</head>

<body>
  <%= render_breadcrumbs %>
</body>
</html>

Even if you don't want to use a plugin, I encourage you to give it a look. It's open source and you can grab some idea for your app.

like image 152
Simone Carletti Avatar answered Oct 14 '22 21:10

Simone Carletti


I made a gem named Gretel that is a Ruby on Rails plugin for creating breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs are configured in a separate configuration file and selected in the view.

Example config/breadcrumbs.rb:

crumb :root do
  link "Home", root_path
end

crumb :projects do
  link "Projects", projects_path
end

crumb :project do |project|
  link project.name, project_path(project)
  parent :projects
end

crumb :project_issues do |project|
  link "Issues", project_issues_path(project)
  parent :project, project
end

crumb :issue do |issue|
  link issue.name, issue_path(issue)
  parent :project_issues, issue.project
end

In your view:

<% breadcrumb :issue, @issue %>

In your app/views/layouts/application.html.erb:

<%= breadcrumbs pretext: "You are here: " %>
like image 43
Lasse Bunk Avatar answered Oct 14 '22 21:10

Lasse Bunk