This one is driving me crazy, appreciate it VERY much if someone can even give me some hints at where to look in Rails source code to understand/debug what's going on, I'm getting lost trying to look through it.
Rails 3.0.8. I have an engine(gem).
It provides a controller at app/controllers/advanced_controller.rb, and a corresonding helper at app/helpers/advanced_helper.rb. (And some views of course).
So far so good, the controller/helper/views are just automatically available in the application using the gem, great.
But I want to let the local application selective over-ride helper methods from AdvancedHelper in the engine (and ideally be able to call 'super'). That's a pretty reasonable thing to want to allow, right, a perfectly reasonable (and I'd think common) design?
Problem is I can't get it to work. Let's say there's a method #do_something in the engine's app/helpers/advanced_helper.rb.
* If the local app provides an app/helpers/advanced_helper.rb, then it completely replaces the one from the engine, the one from the engine isn't loaded at all. (So it has none of it's methods, even though we just wanted to over-ride one of em). Okay, this isn't actually TOO unexpected.
* So I provide a helper called, say local_advanced_helper.rb(LocalAdvancedHelper) in my local app/helpers. It DOES load. If it implements a #new_method_name, that helper is of course available in views (including the engine's views, as it happens). However, if it tries to over-ride the engine's #do_something ... the local do_something is never called.
The engine's helper seems to be 'included' in the module providing helper methods to views earlier in the call chain (later in the 'include' order) then my local helpers. So there's no way for local helpers to over-ride helpers from the engine. (The engine could theoretically call 'super' to call 'up' to the local view helper with the same name, but of course that makes little sense, that kind of dependency is probably seldom appropriate). The ones from the engine are always first in the call chain, before any view helper modules in local app.
Can anyone shed any light on what's going on? Including pointing me to the relevant parts of Rails code? Or suggesting any way I can get this kind of design (local app can over-ride view helpers provided by Engine) to work? Or tell me if this is a bug, or by design, or neither (just didn't consider use case), or what?
Any feedback much appreciated. I've been going crazy trying to figure this out for hours now. Also posted (in slightly different words) at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6380064/rails3-engine-helper-over-ride
Jonathan