Question

I’m following the Rails Tutorial to get started (for the 4000th time) with Ruby on Rails. I’m pretty much racing through the first couple of chapters, as I have already read and typed these quite a lot of times but I just ran into a minor problem which I cannot seem to solve.

In one of the chapters, it is suggested that we create a helper function to make the displaying of page titles more dynamic.

The helper looks like this:

module ApplicationHelper
  
  #return title on per page basis
  def title
    base_title = "Ruby on Rails Tutorial Sample App"
    if @title.nil?
      base_title
    else
      "#{base_title} | #{@title}"
    end
  end
end

My controller looks like this:

class PagesController < ApplicationController
  def home
    @title = "Home"
  end
  # more pages
end

And finally, my application layout file contains the following line:

  <title><%= @title %></title>

The books says that it should now "echo" (is this PHP lingo? Tee-hee) the following title:

Ruby on Rails Tutorial Sample App | Home for the homepage. However, it only echoes ‘Home’ as the page title.

Am I overlooking something here? I don’t think I typed any errors or anything; everything looks fairly logical to me, however it won’t work.

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Calling @title in your view refers to the variable, not the method. As the variable @title is equal to “Home”, this is what you get. To call the method, you should try something like :

<title><%= title %></title>