Clearing a plugins instance variables on each request

rubyonrails-talk
1

I'm trying to move some of my application's code into a plugin, specifically the part that deals with web analytics. Some of the features allow the controller to fire events that get displayed in the views as JS code through a partial or helper. I'm currently doing this with instance variables, but when I move it to a class or instance variable of my plugin class, it persists between requests. I guess this makes sense because the plugin is loaded on startup.

What I have working is making it an instance variable of ApplicationController:

class MyPlugin    ApplicationController.instance_variable_set("@my_plugin_event", nil) end

which is cleared on every request. It works, but I feel like I'm working against the grain here and doing something wrong.

Is what I'm doing OK, or is there a better way? To make it clear, I want to be able to do something like "notice_event('blah')" in the controller of the main application, and have the plugin's helper know about "blah" for the current request, but not the next request.

Thanks

Sean

2

Sean,

Would flash.now work?

http://apidock.com/rails/ActionController/Flash/FlashHash/now

Anthony Crumley

http://commonthread.com

3

It would seem to do what I'm looking for, though was the flash meant for objects? Either way, I'll look at the implementation to see if I can use similar methods.

Thanks,

Sean

4

Sean,

I think flash.now would be fine for objects because it is only there during the request and is not persisted.

Anthony Crumley http://commonthread.com