Tracking website sections

Rails
1

I’d like some advise on how you handle marking website menus as
‘selected’ so that you can show different states based on which
section of a site you’re in.
An example is using tabs like the illustration below. When in the
first section, the tab has an outline and when moved to the next
section, the second tab has the outline

±--------+
| Menu #1 | Menu #2 Menu #3

     +---------+

Menu #1 | Menu #2 | Menu #3

To clarify, I know how to do the CSS etc. I’m looking for best
practice on tracking this state in a Rails app.
Once way that I have thought of is to link the menu to the current
controller
if controller == XYZ
menu is selected
else
menu is normal
end

This works in simple cases but doesn’t work well when using nested
resources.

Thanks for the help

Andrew T.
http://ramblingsonrails.com

http://MyMvelope.com - The SIMPLE way to manage your savings

2

Andrew T. wrote:

I’d like some advise on how you handle marking website menus as
‘selected’ so that you can show different states based on which
section of a site you’re in.
An example is using tabs like the illustration below. When in the
first section, the tab has an outline and when moved to the next
section, the second tab has the outline

Would current_page be of any help?

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

3

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 9:51 AM, Marnen
Laibow-Koser[email protected] wrote:

I don’t think so because that seems to do a direct comparison (after
splitting off query params)
I would need something more generic

Andrew T.
http://ramblingsonrails.com

http://MyMvelope.com - The SIMPLE way to manage your savings

4

It’s probably not ideal, but I’ve used the simplest possible solution
for this in some live code - just set an instance variable in the
controller and refer to it in the view / layout where the menu is. You
can even set the variable in a before_filter if it is the same across
all the actions in your controller.

Again, probably not the most “meta” solution available, but able to
handle any weird site layout you might have.

–Matt J.

On Jul 3, 12:56 am, Andrew T. [email protected]