Easy breadcrumbs for RESTful rails application

Question

Is there any helper method (Other than default rails breadcrumb) that generates bread crumb navigation dynamically for a particular page without having to pass trivial parameters in RESTful application? That is, something that figures out automatically where the user is based on the REST url she is visiting?

For above mentioned implementation, we need to pass parameters like

REST

<% add_crumb(‘Profile’, user_profile_path) %>

Current page

<% add_crumb(“My Incoming Messages”, request.path) %>

There must be a way to generalize the code so that no parameter passing is required and should work for all RESTful apps with minimal configuration.

Answer 1

Developed a simple hack. The method however assumes that there exists a method 'name' for every model object corresponding to each resource in the RESTful url. Whatever that the method 'name' returns is shown as breadcrumb name. If it is not found, it is shown as it is without making it link to anything. Separator used is '->' You may change it to suit your requirement.

def get_bread_crumb(url)
  begin
    breadcrumb = ''
    sofar = '/'
    elements = url.split('/')
    for i in 1...elements.size
      sofar += elements[i] + '/'
      if i%2 == 0
        begin
          breadcrumb += "<a href='#{sofar}'>"  + eval("#{elements[i - 1].singularize.camelize}.find(#{elements[i]}).name").to_s + '</a>'
        rescue
          breadcrumb += elements[i]
        end
      else
        breadcrumb += "<a href='#{sofar}'>#{elements[i].pluralize}</a>"
      end
      breadcrumb += ' -> ' if i != elements.size - 1
    end
    breadcrumb
  rescue
    'Not available'
  end
end

The method generally accepts request.url (Which given url of the current page) as the parameter. The method purposefully accepts the url for customization purposes. To generate the breadcrumb, simply add following code in your view -

<%= get_bread_crumb(request.url) %>

For the url /ideabox/2/idea/1, the bread crumb looks like

alt text http://www.imagechicken.com/uploads/1234855404069992300.png

Excuse me if code quality is not that great. I'm sure this code can be re-factored but I'm also sure you would be able to do that before using it.

Thanks.