You can't access instance variables setup in a previously called
action as the controller object is re-constructed for each request.
It is possible that the server shut down due to innactivity in the
intervening time, or the requests could even be handled in different
instances of the server (in production there may be multiple instances
running). One way to solve this is to use a before filter to
initialise the variables.
Even if you worked out why that was happening it is not safe, as I
mentioned in my previous post there may be multiple instances of the
server running in production so this would not work.