TabsOnRails is a simple Rails plugin for creating and managing Tabs in Rails projects. It provides helpers for creating tabs with a flexible interface.
The release 0.3.0 is now available as a GEM. The most important feature is the concurrent tabs support, also known as multi-tabs or namespaces. Namespaces enable you to create and manage tabs in parallels. Let me show you an example.
Let’s assume your application provides a first level navigation menu with 3 elements: :home, :dashboard, :projects. The relationship between your tabs and your controllers is 1:1 so you should end up with the following source code.
class HomeController set_tab :home end class DashboardController set_tab :dashboard end class ProjectsController set_tab :projects def first; end def second; end def third; end end
The project controller contains 3 actions and you might want to create a second-level navigation menu. This menu should reflect the navigation status of the user in the project page.
Without namespaces, you wouldn’t be able to accomplish this task because you already set the current tab value to :projects. You need to create a concurrent navigation menu and uniquely identify it with a custom namespace.
Let’s call it :navigation.
class ProjectsController set_tab :projects # Create an other tab navigation level set_tab :first, :navigation, :only => %w(first) set_tab :second, :navigation, :only => %w(second) set_tab :third, :navigation, :only => %w(third) def first; end def second; end def third; end end
Voilà! That’s all you need to do. And you can create an unlimited number of namespace as long as you use an unique name to identify them.
The default namespace is called :default. Passing :default as name is the same as don’t using any namespace at all. The following lines are equivalent.
set_tab :projects set_tab :projects, :default
Namespaces supports all the other features already available in TabsOnRails including custom Builders for your Rails tabs. See the documentation page for further information.
The plugin source is available on GiHub, the project documentation and tickets are hosted on my Redmine installation. You can install/upgrade TabsOnRails by running
$ sudo gem install weppos-tabs_on_rails --source http://gems.github.com
