How can I extend ApplicationController in a gem?

Question

I thought I\'d come up with a slick way to extend ApplicationController in a Rails 3.x gem.

In my gem\'s lib/my_namespace/my_controller.rb, I had:

Answer 1

I was able to reference ApplicationController with an initializer callback.

gem code that subclasses/references ApplicationController:

class GemApplicationController < ApplicationController
  before_filter :method_to_call

  def method_to_call
    #your code here
  end
end

gem code callback to create subclassed controller:

module GemName
  def self.load_gem_application_controller
    require "path/to/gem_application_controller"
  end
end

rails_app/config/initializers/gem_name.rb

GemName.load_gem_application_controller

Then have controllers that use this functionality subclass GemApplicationController

class SpecialCaseController < GemApplicationController
  # this will inherit from the gem's controller, 
  # which inherits from the rails_app ApplicationController
end