views & link_to

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have a few related questions about views. Specifically, how do you call link_to from a method rather than a view? Calling from a method in the model, the result of   ActionView::Helpers::UrlHelper.link_to(...) is   undefined method `link_to' for ActionView::Helpers::UrlHelper:Module

More generally, how does Rails process a view? What is self inside an ERb form? What is its class? (self.class called inside the view returns "#") How does it get instance variables from the controller? How does it get access to link_to?

2

Okay, I finally learned what a module instance method is. But link_to calls url_for, which looks for @controller, which is an attribute of ActionView::Base. So what does the object need to inherit from, and how do you instantiate it?