DRY up Rails Navigation Code

Question

In my Rails 4 app i used to have every view contain a content_for :nav tag which included all of the links for the nav bar in my layout. This was getting annoying because if i wanted to add a button i would have to go through every view and add that link. I decide to make a partial view in layouts/_nav.haml which contains:

= link_to 'Home', root_path, :class => "btn #{active_page(root_path)}"
= link_to 'Sign in', sign_in_path, :class => "btn #{active_page(sign_in_path)}"
= link_to 'Account', account_path, :class => "btn #{active_page(account_path)}"

and then in my application_helper.rb i added:

def active_page(path)
 'active' if current_page?(path)
end

I know this isn't the best approach, is there any way to DRY up this solution or make it better. Im using bootstrap and i tried the simple-navigation gem but it wasn't that useful in my situation.

Answer 1

You could create another helper to create your navigation links:

def navigation_link_to(text, path)
 link_to text, path, class: "btn #{active_page(path)}"
end 

Then in your view:

= navigation_link_to 'Home', root_path
= navigation_link_to 'Sign in', sign_in_path
= navigation_link_to 'Account', account_path

• tokland: +1 this is the bottom-up approach to DRY, let's hope someone to contribute the top-down approach :-)
• Sirupsen: What do you mean with "top-down DRY"?
• tokland: A top-down DRYing here would use a each loop.
• Sirupsen: Ah yeah, I didn't wanna do that since I think this is more clear to read in the view code, than defining an array of objects. Perhaps unless you have a very large amount of links.
• tokland: Exactly, when there are few elements that's the more readable. And when elements grow you can always combine both, a method abstraction + a loop of the data.