How do I implement Section-specific navigation in Ruby on Rails?

Question

I have a Ruby/Rails app that has two or three main "sections". When a user visits that section, I wish to display some sub-navigation. All three sections use the same layout, so I can't "hard code" the navigation into the layout.

I can think of a few different methods to do this. I guess in order to help people vote I'll put them as answers.

Any other ideas? Or what do you vote for?

Answer 1

You can easily do this using partials, assuming each section has it's own controller.

Let's say you have three sections called Posts, Users and Admin, each with it's own controller: PostsController, UsersController and AdminController.

In each corresponding views directory, you declare a _subnav.html.erb partial:

/app/views/users/_subnav.html.erb
/app/views/posts/_subnav.html.erb
/app/views/admin/_subnav.html.erb

In each of these subnav partials you declare the options specific to that section, so /users/_subnav.html.erb might contain:

<ul id="subnav">
  <li><%= link_to 'All Users', users_path %></li>
  <li><%= link_to 'New User', new_user_path %></li>
</ul>

Whilst /posts/_subnav.html.erb might contain:

<ul id="subnav">
  <li><%= link_to 'All Posts', posts_path %></li>
  <li><%= link_to 'New Post', new_post_path %></li>
</ul>

Finally, once you've done this, you just need to include the subnav partial in the layout:

<div id="header">...</div>    
<%= render :partial => "subnav" %>
<div id="content"><%= yield %></div>
<div id="footer">...</div>

Answer 2

3. Partial render. This is very similar to the helper method except perhaps the layout would have some if statements, or pass that off to a helper...