I have worked on many applications that require breadcrumbs. Every time, one of the developers has built a quick custom solution. Finally, I decided that we needed a complete solution that we could easily add to future projects, and thus Crummy was born.
Requirements
I set a few requirements that must be fulfilled in order for me to call the plugin a success. They were:
- Ability to add breadcrumbs at Controller class level (like a before filter)
- Ability to add breadcrumbs in the controller methods (such as actions)
- Ability to add breadcrumbs from the views
- Ability to add breadcrumbs with or without an url
- No variable conflicts (such as instance variables)
- Full and strong spec coverage
- Good documentation
I managed to fulfill these requirements and add a few shiny methods to make life easy.
Examples of Usage
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Baseee
add_crumb 'Home', '/' # This will display on EVERY list of breadcrumbs
end
class BusinessController < ApplicationController
# The load order DOES matter.
add_crumb("Businesses") { |instance| instance.send :businesses_path } # Show on all actions
add_crumb("Comments", :only => [:comments, :show]) { |instance| instance.send :business_comments_path } # Only add the comments link on the comments and show actions.
before_filter :load_comment, :only => “show”
def show
add_crumb @business.display_name, @business
end
def load_comment
@comment = Comment.find(params[:id])
end
end
Golden Feature
One of the most useful argument usage is add_crumb :comment. What this does is turns the symbol into an instance variable (@comment.) Then it roughly translates into:
# add_crumb :comment
before_filter :add_comment_breadcrumb
def add_comment_breadcrumb
add_crumb @comment.to_s, @comment
end
Installation
script/plugin install git://github.com/zachinglis/crummy.git
