Rails - How to use a Helper Inside a Controller

Question

While I realize you are supposed to use a helper inside a view, I need a helper in my controller as I\'m building a JSON object to return.

It goes a little like this:

Answer 1

Note: This was written and accepted back in the Rails 2 days; nowadays grosser's answer is the way to go.

Option 1: Probably the simplest way is to include your helper module in your controller:

class MyController < ApplicationController
  include MyHelper

  def xxxx
    @comments = []
    Comment.find_each do |comment|
      @comments << {:id => comment.id, :html => html_format(comment.content)}
    end
  end
end

Option 2: Or you can declare the helper method as a class function, and use it like so:

MyHelper.html_format(comment.content)

If you want to be able to use it as both an instance function and a class function, you can declare both versions in your helper:

module MyHelper
  def self.html_format(str)
    process(str)
  end

  def html_format(str)
    MyHelper.html_format(str)
  end
end

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

In Rails 5 use the helpers.helper_function in your controller.

Example:

def update
  # ...
  redirect_to root_url, notice: "Updated #{helpers.pluralize(count, 'record')}"
end

Source: From a comment by @Markus on a different answer. I felt his answer deserved it's own answer since it's the cleanest and easier solution.

Reference: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/24866