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Breadcrumbs On Rails

Code Climate

BreadcrumbsOnRails is a simple Ruby on Rails plugin for creating and managing a breadcrumb navigation for a Rails project. It provides helpers for creating navigation elements with a flexible interface.

Requirements

  • Rails 3 or Rails 4

Please note

  • BreadcrumbsOnRails 2.x requires Rails 3. Use BreadcrumbsOnRails 1.x with Rails 2.
  • BreadcrumbsOnRails doesn't work with Rails 2.1 or lower.

Installation

RubyGems is the preferred way to install BreadcrumbsOnRails and the best way if you want install a stable version.

$ gem install breadcrumbs_on_rails

Specify the Gem dependency in the Bundler Gemfile.

gem "breadcrumbs_on_rails"

Use Bundler and the :git option if you want to grab the latest version from the Git repository.

Usage

Creating a breadcrumb navigation menu in your Rails app using BreadcrumbsOnRails is really straightforward.

In your controller, call add_breadcrumb to push a new element on the breadcrumb stack. add_breadcrumb requires two arguments: the name of the breadcrumb and the target path.

class MyController

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

  def index
    # ...

    add_breadcrumb "index", index_path
  end

end

See the section "Breadcrumb Element" for more details about name and target class types.

The third, optional argument is a Hash of options to customize the breadcrumb link.

class MyController
  def index
    add_breadcrumb "index", index_path, :title => "Back to the Index"
  end
end

In your view, you can render the breadcrumb menu with the render_breadcrumbs helper.

<!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>

render_breadcrumbs understands a limited set of options. For example, you can pass change the default separator with the :separator option.

<body>
  <%= render_breadcrumbs :separator => ' / ' %>
</body>

Current possible options are:

  • :separator
  • :tag

To use with Bootstrap you might use the following:

<body>
  <ol class="breadcrumb">
    <%= render_breadcrumbs :tag => :li, :separator => "" %>
  </ol>
</body>

More complex customizations require a custom @Builder@.

Breadcrumb Element

A breadcrumbs menu is composed by a number of Element objects. Each object contains two attributes: the name of the breadcrumb and the target path.

When you call add_breadcrumb, the method automatically creates a new Element object for you and append it to the breadcrumbs stack. Element name and path can be one of the following Ruby types:

  • Symbol
  • Proc
  • String

Symbol

If the value is a Symbol, the library calls the corresponding method defined in the same context the and sets the Element attribute to the returned value.

class MyController
  
  # The Name is set to the value returned by
  # the :root_name method.
  add_breadcrumb :root_name, "/"
  
  protected
  
    def root_name
      "the name"
    end
  
end

Proc

If the value is a Proc, the library calls the proc passing the current view context as argument and sets the Element attribute to the returned value. This is useful if you want to postpone the execution to get access to some special methods/variables created in your controller action.

class MyController

  # The Name is set to the value returned by
  # the :root_name method.
  add_breadcrumb Proc.new { |c| c.my_helper_method },
                 "/"

end

String

If the value is a String, the library sets the Element attribute to the string value.

class MyController

  # The Name is set to the value returned by
  # the :root_name method.
  add_breadcrumb "homepage", "/"

end

Restricting breadcrumb scope

The add_breadcrumb method understands all options you are used to pass to a Rails controller filter. In fact, behind the scenes this method uses a before_filter to store the tab in the @breadcrumbs variable.

Taking advantage of Rails filter options, you can restrict a tab to a selected group of actions in the same controller.

class PostsController < ApplicationController
  add_breadcrumb "admin", :admin_path
  add_breadcrumb "posts", :posts_path, :only => %w(index show)
end

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  add_breadcrumb "admin", :admin_path, :if => :admin_controller?
  
  def admin_controller?
    self.class.name =~ /^Admin(::|Controller)/
  end
end

Internationalization and Localization

BreadcrumbsOnRails is compatible with the standard Rails internationalization framework.

For example, if you want to localize your menu, define a new breadcrumbs node in your .yml file with all the keys for your elements.

# config/locales/en.yml
en:
  breadcrumbs:
    homepage: Homepage
    first: First
    second: Second
    third: Third

# config/locales/it.yml
it:
  breadcrumbs:
    homepage: Homepage
    first: Primo
    second: Secondo
    third: Terzo

In your controller, use the I18n.t method.

class PostsController < ApplicationController
  add_breadcrumb I18n.t("breadcrumbs.first"),  :first_path
  add_breadcrumb I18n.t("breadcrumbs.second"), :second_path, :only => %w(second)
  add_breadcrumb I18n.t("breadcrumbs.third"),  :third_path,  :only => %w(third)
end

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  add_breadcrumb I18n.t("breadcrumbs.homepage"), :root_path
end

Credits

BreadcrumbsOnRails was created and is maintained by Simone Carletti. Many improvements and bugfixes were contributed by the open source community.

Contributing

Direct questions and discussions to Stack Overflow.

Pull requests are very welcome! Please include tests for every patch, and create a topic branch for every separate change you make.

Report issues or feature requests to GitHub Issues.

More Information

License

Copyright (c) 2009-2015 Simone Carletti. This is Free Software distributed under the MIT license.