Rails way to make a horizontal menu - ruby-on-rails

Question

I want to ask you about best rails way to create a menu.
I should to make a horizontal menu. Every page belongs to the specific item of this menu and this item should has id="current" when user opens on this page.
<ul>
<li id="current">Home</li>
<li>About us</li>
</ul>
As I understand I should to create a special helper which will create this html markup and use this helper with special parameter on every view of every page. Maybe there is a better rails way to do this?
PS. Update
My solution:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
protect_from_forgery
before_filter :open_most_important
protected
def open_most_important
#menu = {
:cases => { :name => 'Cases', :link => '/cases'},
:groups => { :name => 'Groups', :link => '/groups' },
:projects => { :name => 'Projects', :link => '/projects' },
:settings => { :name => 'Settings', :link => '/settings' },
:about => { :name => 'About us', :link => '/about' }}
#current_menu_item = :cases
end
The fragment of the layout application.html.erb:
<div id="menu">
<ul>
<% #menu.each do |item, value| -%>
<% if #current_menu_item == item -%>
<li id="current"><%= value[:name] %></li>
<% else -%>
<li><%= value[:name] %></li>
<% end -%>
<% end -%>
</ul>
</div>
After I need to set #current_menu_item for every controller in the before_filter

Answer 1

If I understand correctly you want this menu to appear on every page. If that is the case you can just add it to your layout. If you don't understand layouts read up on them at Ruby on Rails Guides http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html#customizing-the-layout

Answer 2

This is how I tend to do it:
<%= menu_item("Home", root_path) {
controller.controller_name == "pages" &&
controller.action_name = "home" } %>
<%= menu_item("About us", page_path("about") {
controller.controller_name == "pages" &&
controller.action_name == "about" } %>
The helper:
def menu_item(name, url, options = {})
if yield
options["id"] = "current"
end
link_to name, url, options
end
The "id" will be "current" if the block passed to menu_item returns true.

Answer 3

The way I handle it is to put this in a navigation partial:
<%= nav_link "All Users", users_path, active_tabs.include?('all_users') %>
<%= nav_link "Add User", new_user_path, active_tabs.include?('add_user') %>
And then this helper at the top of each view:
<%= nav 'nav_partials/users_tabs', 'all_users' %> # one view
<%= nav 'nav_partials/users_tabs', 'add_user' %> # another view
And the helpers:
def nav_link(title, path, active, options = {})
if active
options[:class] ? options[:class] += " active" : options[:class] = "active"
end
link_to(title, path, options)
end
def nav(partial, *active_tabs)
partial = "#{params[:controller]}/nav_partials/#{partial}" unless partial.chars.first == '/'
render :partial => partial, :locals => { :active_tabs => active_tabs }
end
To me, it is elegant, even though there are some things that could be a bit better (like the file path thing in the nav helper, as well as referencing params in the helper). But it works very nicely, and it's very flexible.