I stumbled today on an apparently little-known method in Rails, which solved a problem that has been vexing me for months: how to use helper methods from controllers/models/views/whatever other than the one you’re currently working in. No amount of Googling or begging for suggestions in the (mostly useless) #rubyonrails IRC channel could do me any good.
Ok, so on Lovetastic, we have an account dashboard which pulls together lots of information from different models. This dashboard (for now anyway) rests in AccountController. However, I want to use a formatting helper to display a human-friendly version of people’s subscription expiration dates, the code for which rests in SubscriptionHelper. And I don’t want to have to duplicate any code to do it.
The helper in question, natch, is associated with a separate controller, so its methods don’t get mixed into the AccountController. So I had been trying all sorts of stupid and ugly hacks to include that helper code cleanly into the AccountController’s dashboard view. I tried using shared partials, raw ruby includes, and a couple even more arcane backflips, to no avail.
Then, with hours of sufficiently creative Googling, I was able to turn up a super-tidy Rails Way™ to do this.
1 2 3 4 5 |
class AccountController < ApplicationController helper :subscription ... end |
And, bam. There you have it. You can now use all the helper methods in SubscriptionHelper anywhere in an AccountController template.
Who knew?