I have a pretty standard partial for my sidebar that I want to display the login form etc if the user is not logged in and if they are then display the relevant links.
As far as I can tell, calling render :partial does not trigger methods in the controller class. So how do I get application data into the partial.
The partial is invoked by the layout, which doesn't have access to controller functions so they only way I can see around this is to create the required objects in a befor_filter.
Is there a more elegant way to do this? without render_component?