Breadcrumbs On Rails

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.

Requirements

  • Rails 3

Please note

  • BreadcrumbsOnRails 2.x requires Rails 3. Use BreadcrumbsOnRails 1.x with Rails 2.
  • BreadcrumbsOnRails doesn't work with Rails 2.1 or lower.

Installation

RubyGems is the preferred way to install BreadcrumbsOnRails and the best way if you want install a stable version.

$ gem install breadcrumbs_on_rails

Specify the Gem dependency in the Bundler Gemfile.

gem "breadcrumbs_on_rails"

Use Bundler and the :git option if you want to grab the latest version from the Git repository.

Basic Usage

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

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>

More complex customizations require a custom Builder.

Read the documentation to learn more about advanced usage and builders.

Credits

Resources

License

BreadcrumbsOnRails is Copyright (c) 2009-2012 Simone Carletti. This is Free Software distributed under the MIT license.