I have a method inside a controller that has many lines of code (some of them used to generate/read cookies).
In order to keep the code readable and use the object-oriented power of Ruby, I created a foreign class that I call in my method using:
def index require('foreign_class') f = Foreign.new @out = f.foreign_method end
The problem is, when the foreign_method tries to create a cookies with
cookies[:c] = 'id'
it says "undefined local variable or method 'cookies'
So... it's not possible to handle cookies in foreign classes. Or it's not even supposed to use foreign classes in Ruby?
I'm trying to figure out how to say this nicely, but I'm not coming up with anything. Bluntly, you don't seem to understand OO. The reason cookies isn't available in your "foreign" class is that cookies is a method of the controller (inherited from ActionController::Base). This is to be expected since objects provide separate namespaces for methods and instance variables; that's a pretty fundamental part of what it means to be object oriented.
Also, working in an OO language does not necessarily imply that creating a new object class is the best approach in all cases. For what you seem to be trying to do, I'd recommend using a module (a.k.a. mixin) that you include in your controller class. A module's methods have access to all the methods and instance variables of the class in which it is included, such as the cookies method.
Thanks a lot.
--Greg
