I have six distinct sections of my Rails application, all of which have their own models, views, and controllers.
I'm trying to create a "dashboard" page that accesses variables from each of the sections. For instance, in one of my controllers, I have this condition:
if @retirementsavingsdiff < 0
@retiregrade = "pass"
end
I can't seem to access this variable from a different view/controller though.
Do I put my dashboard logic in application_controller.rb?
A good option for making code reusable is separating it out into modules. Rails 4 includes something called Concerns that make this really easy. Here's a blog post with a good illustration of using Concerns for Controllers, and here's a sample of what your code might look like:
# /app/controllers/concerns/retirement_grade_checker.rb
module RetirementGradeChecker
extend ActiveSupport::Concern
def check_retire_grade
@retirementsavingsdiff = params[:retirementsavingsdiff]
if @retirementsavingsdiff < 0
@retiregrade = "pass"
end
end
end
# /app/controllers/retirement_controller.rb
class RetirementController < ApplicationController
include RetirementGradeChecker
def index
check_retire_grade
#... other stuff
end
end
# /app/controllers/dashboard_controller.rb
class DashboardController < ApplicationController
include RetirementGradeChecker
def index
check_retire_grade
#... other stuff
end
end
I would avoid using view helpers and instead create a new class or module with all of your logic inside. By doing that you can reuse that logic whenever you need it.
Why do this instead of helpers? You can easily test it.
methods defined inside helpers are automatically available across all views.
if you want to convert a method defined inside the controller to a helper method, you can do that too:
def my_method
# code
end
helper_method :my_method
UPDATE:
here is an example from API
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
helper_method :current_user, :logged_in?
def current_user
@current_user ||= User.find_by(id: session[:user])
end
def logged_in?
current_user != nil
end
end
helper_method :my_method
controllers. cant they be moved tohelpersfiles?