Question

I know Rails’ flash hash is nothing new, but I keep running into the same problem with it.

Controllers should be for business logic and db queries, not formatting strings for display to the user. But the flash hash is always set in the controller. This means that I need to hack and work around Rails to use Helpers that I made to format strings for the flash hash.

Is this just a pragmatic compromise to MVC or am I missing something here?

How do you deal with this problem? Or do you not even see it as one?

Answer 1

It appears to be possible to “forcefully” access helpers from controllers. See this discussion here:

http://lojic.com/blog/2007/07/27/using-helpers-inside-controllers-in-ruby-on-rails/

You could also “render” a partial to an instance variable. See this page:

http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/396

Normally, if you call “render_partial” within a controller, nothing but the partial will be rendered.

Occasionally, it is useful to render a partial to an instance variable as a string so that the view can still be rendered as
normal, and the string can be passed in to the view.

add_variables_to_assigns

@content_for_navbar = @template.render_partial ‘layouts/public_navbar’`