Question

I’m trying to get the following code to work, but it’s giving me an undefined variable error:

class PagesController < ApplicationController
  @company = "Acme"
  def home
    @title = "Welcome to #{company}"
  end
  def faq
    @title = "FAQ | #{company}"
  end
end

How do I access @company within functions?

Answer 1

As in Ruby, every class is an object too, what you are doing here is setting an instance variable named @company on the class object PagesController, not on an instance of PagesController.

What you may want is to use a constant instead of the instance variable. Maybe like this:

class PagesController < ApplicationController
  COMPANY = "Acme"

  def home
    @title = "Welcome to #{COMPANY}"
  end

  def faq
    @title = "FAQ | #{COMPANY}"
  end
end

If you want the company to change dependent of what “page” you are displaying, you should consider adding a Page model which has an attribute which holds the company name or an association to another model named Company.