What is the most elegant way to print breadcrumbs on a website? - breadcrumbs

Question

I've been thinking about this for a long time already. What is the best, or most elegant, way of creating breadcrumbs?
One way would be to have a method be called from controllers. Something like this:
function showUsers()
{
$this->breadcrumbs->add('Users', URL::route('admin.users'));
// ...
}
I personally don't like this way, though, because I'd like to separate the breadcrumb-logic from controllers. Also, if I'd like to e.g. have a Admin Panel -item for many pages inside a controller, I'd need to either define it in the constructor or in every controller method.
Another way could be to utilize named routes, by breaking them into segments. This obviously requires that the routes are sensibly named and structured in some way. Here's some pseudocode:
if($segment[0] == 'admin') {
$breadcrumbs->add('Admin Panel', URL::route('admin');
if($segment[1] == 'users') {
$breadcrumbs->add('Users', URL::route('admin.users');
} elseif($segment[1] == 'foo') {
$breadcrumbs->add(...);
}
}
One issue with this approach is that it's hard to get "data" regarding the current route. For example, I can have a route for showing a single user (admin.users.single), which gets a user ID in the route (e.g. admin/users/{id}). There is no native way for me to construct the correct URL for the breadcrumb item, as the route data is only used inside the controller.
Can you think of any other ways? Opinions on these examples?

Answer 1

To make it more generic instead of having conditional statements on users and user names etc. in the controller. I think it would be best to first define some kind of hierarchy or tree of categories. Storing that info on your backend is up to you (i.e. db, text file, nosql):
+--------------+--------------+---------------------+------------+
| CategoryId | CategoryName | CategoryDisplayName | ParentId |
+--------------+--------------+---------------------+------------+
| 1 | admin | Admin Panel | NULL |
+--------------+--------------+---------------------+------------+
| 2 | admin.users | Users | 1 |
+--------------+--------------+---------------------+------------+
You can separate out the logic of traversing the categories and building of the breadcrumb string. This is easier to understand, test, etc.
i.e. with c#
You can retrieve the list of breadcrumbs based on that data:
IEnumerable<Category> GetHierarchy(string categoryName) {
...
}
i.e. GetHierarchy("Users") would return list "Admin Panel", "Users"
Then build the breadcrumb string:
var currentPage = "admin.users"
strings.Join(">", GetHierarchy(currentPage)
.Select(c => GetLink(c.categoryName, c.categoryDisplayName)))
You can embed this into the view with helpers or just set it from the controller.
GetLink method would return the link containing the route for the category.
i.e.
Users