I am currently building an app that has a tabbed interface. To my surprise I realized that I have never had to code a tabbed application before. I wanted an easy way to add tabs to my rails application. I used a helper method to identify what the currently selected tab is and add an active class to it.

  def link_with_active(text, url)
    link = link_to text, url
    if request.request_uri == url
      return '
' + link + '
'
    else
      return '
' + link + '
'
    end
  end

Basically this method is an if statement that adds the active class to the li item. Since I would almost always build a tabbed list with an li I thought it was a safe assumption to build this in to the method. Then I just call the helper method from my view. Like so.

	<%= link_with_active "Home", "/" %>
	<%= link_with_active "New Invoice", new_invoice_path %>

To be honest I am not totally sure if this is the best way to do this. If anyone has a better way of doing so please comment.