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.
- Ruby >= 2.4
- Rails >= 5
For older versions use a previous release.
Add this line to your application's Gemfile
:
gem "breadcrumbs_on_rails"
And then execute bundle
to install the dependencies:
bundle
Use Bundler and the :git
option if you want to grab the latest version from the Git repository.
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
.
The text of the breadcrumb is html-escaped by default unless it is a SafeBuffer, to prevent XSS attacks.
class MyController
add_breadcrumb "This is the <b>Main</b> page".html_safe
def profile
add_breadcrumb "#{@user_name} Profile", users_profile
end
end
In this case, if @user_name
is <script>
, it will output:
This is the <b>Main</b> page > <script> Profile
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
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
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
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
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: [: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
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: [:second]
add_breadcrumb I18n.t("breadcrumbs.third"), :third_path, only: [:third]
end
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
add_breadcrumb I18n.t("breadcrumbs.homepage"), :root_path
end
Library documentation is auto-generated from the README and the source code, and it's available at https://rubydoc.info/gems/breadcrumbs_on_rails.
- The bug tracker is here: https://github.com/weppos/breadcrumbs_on_rails/issues
- The code repository is here: https://github.com/weppos/breadcrumbs_on_rails. Contributions are welcome! Please include tests and/or feature coverage for every patch, and create a topic branch for every separate change you make.
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BreadcrumbsOnRails was created and is maintained by Simone Carletti. Many improvements and bugfixes were contributed by the open source community.
Full information and description of our security policy please visit SECURITY.md
See the CHANGELOG.md file for details.
Copyright (c) 2009-2020 Simone Carletti. This is Free Software distributed under the MIT license.