Don't forget about 'assigns' in Rails
I had a need to set a property in a before_filter proc in the controller, that was available in the layout. Back when I first did this I first tried just setting an instance variable, but that didn't work. So then I just set a request parameter, which seemed to work just fine. I wasn't particularly happy with this, but I lived with it until it started popping up in my urls. This just started to make me nervous, and certainly made me cringe.
So I started perusing the Rails API, and found that the controllers have an 'assigns' property. This is a hash like request, however it's what creates the instance variables in the view. This is available in the before_filter procs, so viola.
Controller:
before_filter(:only => [ :index ])
{ |c| c.assigns[:css_mode] = 'albums' }
View:
<body class="<%= @css_mode %>">
This is one of those things that's not incredibly obvious, but can be very useful.
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