Ruby on Rails: Accessing Controller Methods from Your View

I’ve recently seen several requests come through from people trying to figure out how to call controller methods from their views. The answer is pretty simple. Your controller instance, which is calling your view is stored in the instance variable @controller. So, calling public methods is as simple as this:

@controller.public_method

To call a private method you can do this:

@controller.send("private_method", args)

You should note that if you’re calling controller methods frequently in your views, you should consider putting them into helpers to make them available that way. If you need to manipulate or manage some data, the controller is the place to access the models for this, not the views.

Tagged as: action, controllers, method, views