Links in navbar with Rails and Bootstrap

Question

Say I have a navbar :

<ul class="nav navbar-nav">
  <li><%= link_to 'Item 1', item1_path %>
  <li><%= link_to 'Item 2', item2_path %>
  ...

But this way current menu item is also a link. How do I make it into a span , preserving appearance? Which doesn't look like a good options, since in this case I need to duplicate bootstrap 's styles. Or make it look like a menu item without it pointing to any page?

Answer 1

A link_to method will always render an <a> tag, but you can render a <span> inside of the <a> tag if you use link_to ... do

This is an example taken from this documentation

<%= link_to(@profile) do %>
  <strong><%= @profile.name %></strong> -- <span>Check it out!</span>
<% end %>
<!-- which renders -->
<a href="/profiles/1">
       <strong>David</strong> -- <span>Check it out!</span>
</a>

Answer 2

I came up with the following helper:

module ApplicationHelper
  def menu_item(name, path)
    if current_page? path
      content_tag('a', name)
    else
      link_to name, path
    end
  end
end

With that we've just got to replace link_to with menu_item in original code.