Tag Archive for ‘breadcrumbs’ at ZachInglis.com

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

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