Question

I am building a way to easily include navigation (tabs and subnavs) in my views. I should be able to have different navigations for different controllers, and for different actions within those controllers.

Currently I am using this simple helper method:

def nav_for(tabs_hash, *active_tabs)
  content_tag(:div, 
    tabs_hash[:tab_info].map { |tab| tab == 'spacer' ?
                            content_tag(:div, '', :class => 'nav-spacer') :
                            link_to(tab[:name], tab[:path], :class => [tab[:class], ("active" if active_tabs.include? tab[:id])].join) 
                  }.join("\n").html_safe,
  :class => tabs_hash[:div_class])
end

Which takes a hash that includes the info for the navigation items and parses it out. I am putting these hashes in methods in the controllers, but this prevents me from accessing the navigation hashes from other controllers.

My question is, where would be the best place to store the navigation information? It’s also important that it has access to parameters, because some links are dynamically generated based on query strings.

I’m just looking for the best practices for this scenario. Thank you!

Answer 1

I would say that use of formatting and markup in a helper is a bad idea, why not split this off into a layout partial which would abstract the data from your view. As far as storing the data I would consider how flexible this needs to be at runtime. Can you get away with using a YAML file to define links?