Sometimes when developing a Ruby on Rails web application, you want to use an ActionView helper method inside your controller. The following tip is from Gabriel Gironda ¹.

This is incredibly straightforward and more of an occasional convenience, but I thought I’d throw it out there anyway.

One use case is to use pluralize() in a flash message and not have to do it by hand using the inflector. You could include ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper in the controller, but that fills your namespace with crap.

Put this in the class ApplicationController instead:

  def help
    Helper.instance
  end

  class Helper
    include Singleton
    include ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper
  end

Then you can just use it like so:

  def check_for_max_donkeys
    if Donkey.find_fit_donkeys.size ==
APP_SETTINGS['max_fit_donkeys']
      flash_error "The maximum of
#{help.pluralize(APP_SETTINGS['max_fit_donkeys'], 'donkey')} has
been reached."
      redirect_to_index
    end
  end

Don’t use the method name “helper” because Rails already uses that. Just “help” works fine.