A Rails3 TabsRenderer

I’ve been working on a project using beta 3 of Rails3, and was looking to use tabs from the jQuery UI project. Having run across a post featuring a TabsRenderer helper class, I thought I’d give it a whirl. The code from that post was written in 2008, and it did not work with the beta of Rails3, so I set out to see if I could get it working.

The original code for the helper class, when executed in Rails3, was rendering escaped HTML for the tab bodies, and nothing for the tab headers. Simply changing the call in the view to tabs.render to this:

tabs.render.html_safe

didn’t do the trick for unescaping the tab bodies. What ended up working was using this for the TabsRenderer class:

class TabsRenderer

  def initialize(template, options={})
    @template = template
    @options = options
    @tabs = []
  end

  def create(tab_id, tab_text, options={}, &block)
    raise "Block needed for TabsRenderer#CREATE" unless block_given?
    @tabs << [tab_id, tab_text, options, block]
  end

  def render
    content_tag(:div, (render_tabs.html_safe + render_bodies.html_safe), {:id => :tabs}.merge(@options))
  end

  private #  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

  def render_tabs
    content_tag(:ul, render_headers.html_safe)
  end

  def render_headers
    @tabs.collect do |tab|
      content_tag(:li, link_to(content_tag(:span, tab[1]), "##{tab[0]}") )
    end.to_s
  end

  def  render_bodies
    @tabs.collect do |tab|
      content_tag(:div, capture(&tab[3]), tab[2].merge(:id => tab[0]))
    end.to_s
  end

  def method_missing(*args, &block)
    @template.send(*args, &block)
  end

end

Everything else about the sample code on the original post can be used as originally presented.

Hope this helps you as you adjust to Rails3!

Tagged as: jQuery, jQuery UI, Rails3