Can I get the name of the current controller in the view?

ruby-on-rails model-view-controller view controller
Dan Tao picture Dan Tao · Sep 21, 2010 · Viewed 121.6k times · Source

Is there a way to figure out what the current controller is from within the view?

For an example of why I would want to know this: if several controllers share the same layout, I may have a part in the layout ERB file where I want to highlight the current page's menu item based on the controller.

Maybe that is a bad approach. If so, what is the more preferred way to do this?

I'm interested to know about getting the name of the current controller either way, though.

(Obviously I could put something like @controller_name = 'users' in each controller; but that seems like the sort of thing Rails would've already done behind the scenes. So I'm just wondering if there's a built-in way.)

Answer

Musili picture Musili · Apr 28, 2013

In the Rails Guides, it says:

The params hash will always contain the :controller and :action keys, but you should use the methods controller_name and action_name instead to access these values

ActionController Parameters

So let's say you have a CSS class active , that should be inserted in any link whose page is currently open (maybe so that you can style differently) . If you have a static_pages controller with an about action, you can then highlight the link like so in your view:

<li>
  <a class='button <% if controller.controller_name == "static_pages" && controller.action_name == "about" %>active<%end%>' href="/about">
      About Us
  </a>
</li>

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