Sooner or later want to change the naming of your states or whatever you have to go through the code AND the view as well, also adding a function to transitionTo every route seems not desirable.
My approach is a bit more programmatic and modularized:
# Parent View-Tamplate, holding the navbar DOM elements
App.NavView = Ember.View.extend(
controller: App.NavArrayController
templateName: "ember-nav"
)
# We push NavItems into this array
App.NavArrayController = Ember.ArrayController.create(
content: Ember.A([])
)
# NavItem has two settable properties and
# an programmatic active state depending on the router
App.NavItem = Ember.Object.extend(
title: ''
goto: null # <=this is the name of the state we want to go to!
active: (->
if App.router.currentState.name == @.get "goto"
true
else
false
).property('App.router.currentState.name').cacheable()
)
# the actual NavElement which gets the class="active" if the
# property "active" is true, plus a on-click binding to
# make the Router transition to this state
App.NavItemView = Ember.View.extend(
tagName: "li"
classNameBindings: ["active"]
click: ->
App.router.transitionTo(@get('goto'))
false
)
nav-view.hbs (for twitter-bootstrap-style navs)
<div class="nav-collapse collapse">
<ul class="nav">
{{#each App.NavArrayController}}
{{#view App.NavItemView classBinding="active" gotoBinding="goto"}}
<a href="#" {{bindAttr data-goto="goto"}}> {{title}}</a>
{{/view}}
{{/each}}
</ul>
</div>
This way, I can just create and mess around with my routes in the Router,
and keep the Nav-Definitions side-by-side:
# put this somewhere close to the Router
App.NavArrayController.pushObjects(
[
App.NavItem.create(
title: 'Home'
goto: 'home'
),
App.NavItem.create(
title: 'Chat'
goto: 'chat'
),
App.NavItem.create(
title: 'Test'
goto: 'test'
)
]
)
{{linkTo}}provides this behavior automatically -- emberjs.com/guides/routing/defining-your-routes – Semifluid