I’ve been working a little with Ruby on Rails recently. One of the things I needed was a good module for handling navigational breadcrumbs. I googled around a bit, but wasn’t able to find anything that fit my needs. The closest to what I wanted was this example on stackoverflow. It was a great starting point, but I ran into issues when I wanted to use nested controllers. I wanted something a little more flexible. Here’s my final solution. I’m still a complete noob at rails, so feel free to point out any improvements you may have.
Features:
- Splits up the URL and looks up the controllers for each section
- Assumes you have a ‘name’ field on your data structure
- Doesn’t link the last item since it should be the current pag
- Works with nested controllers
- Converts underscores to spaces and titleize’s the labels
- Easy to modify to fit your own purposes
Code:
def get_bread_crumb(url)
begin
breadcrumb = ''
so_far = '/'
elements = url.split('/')
for i in 1...elements.size
so_far += elements[i] + '/'
if elements[i] =~ /^\d+$/
begin
breadcrumb += link_to_if(i != elements.size - 1, eval("#{elements[i - 1].singularize.camelize}.find(#{elements[i]}).name").gsub("_"," ").to_s, so_far)
rescue
breadcrumb += elements[i]
end
else
breadcrumb += link_to_if(i != elements.size - 1,elements[i].gsub("_"," ").titleize, so_far)
end
breadcrumb += " » " if i != elements.size - 1
end
breadcrumb
rescue
'Not available'
end
end
begin
breadcrumb = ''
so_far = '/'
elements = url.split('/')
for i in 1...elements.size
so_far += elements[i] + '/'
if elements[i] =~ /^\d+$/
begin
breadcrumb += link_to_if(i != elements.size - 1, eval("#{elements[i - 1].singularize.camelize}.find(#{elements[i]}).name").gsub("_"," ").to_s, so_far)
rescue
breadcrumb += elements[i]
end
else
breadcrumb += link_to_if(i != elements.size - 1,elements[i].gsub("_"," ").titleize, so_far)
end
breadcrumb += " » " if i != elements.size - 1
end
breadcrumb
rescue
'Not available'
end
end
Usage:
<%= get_bread_crumb(request.request_uri) %>
Which converts a URL like this:
/admin/posts/12/comments/8
to breadcrumbs like this:
Admin » Posts » Breadcrumbs in Rails » Comments » Great Post!
