Quick UI helper to determine if the current route is active, for nav links.

mrt add iron-router-active

1. Updated to support Meteor 8.0 (blaze). Thanks to those who contributed to make this happen

2. The methods isActive and isNotActive have been renamed to be more explicit in order to help gaurd against conflicting with any project code. The names were too generic. They are now called isActiveRoute and isNotActiveRoute to match that of isActivePath etc.

After installing the smart package, you'll have access to four new UI helpers called isActiveRoute, isActivePath, isNotActiveRoute and isNotActivePath.

isActiveRoute|isNotActiveRoute works against route names, while isActivePath|isNotActivePath works against the current routes path. It works well with dynamic routes.

The helpers take 2 arguments.

1. routeName or routePath: used to determine whether or not the current route matches the routename that you've passed in. (mandatory)

This value is a regex expression so that you can pass in multiple routes with the | operator. I was unable to pass inline arrays into a Handlebars helper, so this was the next best alternative.

2. className: this is an optional argument. if you do not set it, it will default to active. you can override that value, by specifying your own. The two not active apis will return a class of disabled if you do not specify one.

<nav>
	<ul>
		<li class="{{ isActiveRoute 'dashboard' }}">...</li>
		<li class="{{ isActiveRoute 'dashboard|root' }}">...</li>
		<li class="{{ isActiveRoute 'users' 'on' }}">...</li>
		<li class="{{ isActivePath 'products' }}">...</li>
	</ul>
</nav>

In the first example, the LI element will have a class of active, as we've used the default value.

In the second example, you can see an example of passing in multiple routes.

In the third example, the LI element will have a class of on, as we've overridden the default value with our own.

In the fourth example, you can see an example of checking to see if the current url contains the noun products, which will handle multiple scenarios, such as

1. /products
2. /products/new
3. /products/edit

So now if you had a top level products navigation element, it would stay highlighted even though your routename changes.