Question

tl;dr

What’s a simple way I can create a view helpers module I can use in many apps?

What file, located where, loaded how?

I’m on Rails 2.3.11.

---

I have a bunch of view helper methods. Here’s an example of one of them:

  # Render form input fields to add or edit a ZIP code.
  def render_zip_code_fields( model_instance )
    # Bla bla bla ...
  end

I have about 20 or so that I’ve developed over the years and often use in various applications. I’d like to wrap them all up in one file that I can just drop into and app and then be able to call them in my views.

Why not just copy-and-paste them into application_helper.rb? That just doesn’t feel right to me. It seems like it should be a separate file.

In fact I tried creating in /lib…

# /lib/my_view_helpers.rb

module MyViewHelpers

  # ...

end

And then in application_helper.rb I put…

include MyViewHelpers

But I got a lot of “uninitialized constant MyViewHelpers errors. Maybe a syntax error? I don’t think I need to require my_view_helpers.rb first because it’s in /lib. Everything in there gets loaded automatically, right?

So what’s the right way to do this optimizing for simplicity?

Sorry this is so long. I get verbose when I’m tired.

Answer 1

As of Rails 3, /lib is no longer on the default load path. You will need to put the following line in the Application class in config/application.rb.

config.autoload_paths += ["#{config.root}/lib"]

An alternative would be to drop the file in app/helpers since it is a helper, after all.