Current page class in rails app

Question

I have simple navigation bar in my rails app(Home, News, Contact, etc). And I need to define current page to add :class => 'active'. I find few solution to define current page. And I even created own version. But all of them are reduced to one:

<li class=<%= current_page?(tratata) ? "active" : nil %>...</li>

How I can to apply this solution to all <li> - elements but not to write this every time?

Answer 1

This is not the best way to do it, but will give you some thoughts on pulling the current controller and action.

You can look at https://github.com/weppos/tabs_on_rails for more ideas on how to make it cleaner code. But this requires a bit more setup. You would create a tabs_tag function that would check the current page and do different styling. Personally, I didn't care for this gem too much and prefer to style my pages my own way.

<%= tabs_tag do |tab| %>
  <%= tab.home      'Homepage', root_path %>
  <%= tab.dashboard 'Dashboard', dashboard_path %>
  <%= tab.account   'Account', account_path %>
<% end %>

if "#{controller.controller_name.to_s}.#{controller.action_name.to_s}" == "pages.index"
  <li class='active'>
else
  <li>
end

or use a helper method

def current_page(page,action)
  if controller.controller_name.to_s == page && controller.action_name.to_s == action
    'active'
  else
    'not_active'
 end
end

and in your view

<li class="<%= current_page('pages','index') %>">

Answer 2

One way to do this is to check if the page the user is on matches the name of the controller they're visiting (you could also do a controller name / action name combination for extra specificity).

application_helper

def nav_helper(arg)
  controller_name == arg ? "current" : ""
end

view

<li class="<%= nav_helper('about') %>">
  <a href="#">A link</a>
</li>

EDIT:

Woops, I wrote this before you edited your question. To add this to all 'li' tags, use another helper which uses content_tag and place the nav_helper method inside of it.