Free-for-all: Tab Helper

Koz and I have opinions, and we like sharing them. This site was designed as a platform for us to express those opinions.

You all have opinions, too, and some of you even have opinions that (gasp!) differ from ours. Don’t try to deny it—we read the comments on this site, too.

Well here’s your chance play the game. Nate Morse sent us an email shortly after RailsConf in which he described a problem that Koz and I would like to present to you, our readers. How would you respond?

I’ve been trying to figure out a clean way to implement a tabbed view on a website where the selected tab is written out in a <span /> element and anything unselected is a link to the particular action. So far, this is what I’ve come up with.

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def tab_to(name, options = {})
  url = options.is_a?(String) ? options : url_for(options.merge({:only_path => false}))
  current_url = url_for(:action => @current_action, :only_path => false)
  if (url == current_url)
    content_tag(:span, name)
  else
    link_to(name, options)
  end
end

The @current_action variable is set in a before filter and used to determine if the tab I’m specifying is for the current action. Some of this code is lifted straight from the source of link_to (which is why it will accept either an options hash or a url) and is probably overkill. Also, it seems kind of hokey that I’m setting the :only_path key in a couple of places just to get the urls in a standard form. Is there a better way to do this?

Please post your responses in the comments. Because the comments aren’t editable, you should probably draft your response externally and then paste it in. You can use textile codes to format the text. For syntax-highlighted code snippets, just enclose the snippets in <macro:code> tags, with the lang attribute set to the language of the snippet (e.g., “ruby”, or “rhtml”). For example:

<macro:code lang="ruby"> def foo(a,b) return a + b end </macro:code>

At the end of the week, Koz and I will write up a summary, highlighting a few of the responses. Read, set, go!