Question

I have a controller with two methods: a and b. Method a initializes variable var.
I open a browser tab and call method a. After opening another tab, I call method b which reads var and I get a nil.

I inspected the console and was quite surprised that the id of the controller object is a different one when calling method b.

Shouldn’t it be the same controller instance with access to variable var inside method b ?

Answer 1

Rails creates a new controller instance for each request. From the documentation:

When your application receives a request, the routing will determine which controller and action to run, then Rails creates an instance of that controller and runs the method with the same name as the action.

What are you trying to achieve?