helper_method to the rescue

http://ruby.robu.se/posts/4-helper_method-to-the-rescue

 

I have been coding ruby and Rails off and on for quite a while now, so I don’t expect to discover entire new concepts at this point. But still I learn lots of useful little things on a regular basis!

Until now I hadn’t realize how to make helper methods available both for all controllers and all views. There were always a small number of methods duplicated in “application.rb” and “application_helper.rb”. Yesterday I took the time to ask on the very friendly Swedish Rails mailing list about this.

The answer is to put everything in “application.rb” and use the “helper_method” method to declare which methods should also be available in the views. Like so:

helper_method :logged_in?, :logged_in_user def logged_in? !! session[:user_id] end def logged_in_user logged_in? ? User.find(session[:user_id]) : nil end