Use helpers in controller

Rails applied Restful as part of its design.

To follow Restful, you should:

1. Model your web app as resources
2. Manipulate your app's resources through a conventional interface

Ex:
- if you have Product resource then urls to CRUD (Create, Edit, Update, Delete) this resource would be:

Action	Urls	Web Method	Restful Interface
Create	/products	POST	products_url
Edit	/products/1/edit	POST	edit_product_url
Update	/products	PUT	product_url
Delete	/products	DELETE	product_url

Then to get links to delete/edit a product through Restful interface, we can use link_to method as below:

link_to 'Edit', edit_product_path(product)

link_to 'Remove', product_path(product), :confirm => 'Are you sure?', 
        :method => :delete

By default, you can only use above interfaces in View layer. How can we use those in Controller layer?

• In Rails 2, call through @template variable
  @template.link_to('Edit', edit_product_path(product))

• In Rails 3, call through view_context method
  view_context.link_to('Delete', product_path(product), :confirm => 'Are you sure?', :method => :delete)

References

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3300582/rails-3-template-variable-inside-controllers-is-nil

[2] http://railscasts.com/episodes/132-helpers-outside-views