Hi,
I'm setting my layout in a before_filter.
before_filter :find_current_site
layout $layout
def find_current_site
It's working on my local mongrel server, but on my live server (also mongrel) I always end up with no layout, no matter how many times I refresh.
Does anyone know what is going on here?
yep.. when you are in development mode, the classes (most of them anyhow) get reloaded at each request. This means the code is reinterpreted every time and that's why: a) you don't need to restart so it's cool to try things quickly, and: b) it's much slower than running in production mode.
When in production, the classes get interpreted when loaded, and they are not reinterpreted every time. That's why you need to restart the server when you change the code. This means the class variables will keep their values between calls unless you modify them explicitely. So what's going on is first time you reference your controller, variable $layout doesn't have any value, so you get a nil there. Then no matter what you do, the nil is there between calls.
There are different approaches to this, the most similar to your solution being just to use a proc instead of a value for the layout. You can say layout :find_current_site and then that method must return a String with the layout name. That should do the trick.
Also, using global variables is generally speaking a bad idea if you want to make solid modular code, so I'd try to avoid them when possible.
regards,
javier ramirez