A kind of monkey patch and an invitation for criticism for all you (who know this stuff better than I do)

rubyonrails-talk
1

I've often felt the need including Rails' view helpers within my controllers, if only for some simple things like formatting my flash notices with text helpers or html escaping. I loved this suggestion, which helps by not cluttering the namespace of controllers:

http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/1799

But I wanted to generalize this a little to automatically include whatever helper modules are included in the views. So I dreamt up 35 lines of goodness:

class Object   def metaclass; class << self; self; end; end end

module ActionController   class Base     class_inheritable_accessor :controller_helper_module     class_inheritable_accessor :controller_helper_object     self.controller_helper_module = Module.new     self.controller_helper_object = Object.new

    class << self       def add_template_helper_with_controller_helper(helper_module)         self.controller_helper_module.send(:include, helper_module)         recreate_controller_helper_object         add_template_helper_without_controller_helper(helper_module)       end       alias_method_chain :add_template_helper, :controller_helper

      def inherited_with_controller_helper(child)         inherited_without_controller_helper(child)         child.controller_helper_module.send :include, controller_helper_module         child.recreate_controller_helper_object       end       alias_method_chain :inherited, :controller_helper

      def recreate_controller_helper_object         self.controller_helper_object = Object.new         self.controller_helper_object.metaclass.send(:include, controller_helper_module)       end     end

    protected

    def help       self.class.controller_helper_object     end

  end end