Navigation

The Navigation widgets works pretty much like the Tabnav but generates navigation links instead of tabs.

How to generate Navigation links

Let’s generate a main tabbed navigation for our site (I’ll call it main, you can call it what you want)

$ script/generate navigation main
      create  app/views/widgets
      create  app/views/widgets/_main_navigation.html.erb

It creates a partial with the navigation definition.
Now we can insert the navigation wherever we want, I’ll put it in my app/views/layouts/application.html.erb.

...
<%= navigation :main %>	
<%= yield %>
...

Reload your pages, you should see top right navigation links.
Now you can edit the app/views/widgets/_main_navigation.html.erb partial:

...
  add_item do |i|
    i.named "home"
    i.links_to :controller => "invoices"
  end
  ...
  add_item :link => "http://www.seesaw.it"

Example: Welcome message, help, and logout

...
add_item do |i|
  i.named "#{current_user.name}'s account"
  i.links_to :controller => 'account'
end if current_user

add_item do |i|
  i.named "welcome guest"
  i.disable! # the link is not clickable
end

add_item do |i|
  i.named "help"
  i.links_to :controller => 'help'
  i.new_window true
end

add_item do |i|
  i.named "logout"
  i.function_to 'App.logOutAction();'
end if logged_in?

Why should I use this?

The Navigation widgets offers a couple of benefits over standard links:

• you can disable items with i.disable!
• you can highlight the items using the same Tabnav highlighting system.

If you do not use these features, It’s probably better to use plain links.