Basic variable question

Rails
1

Sorry if this may be a stupid question…

In my controller, what is the difference between doing:

total = 0

and

@total = 0

Thanks,

/mich

2

In ruby, instance variables start with an @ and local variables don’t.
What this means in practice is if you want a variable in your controller
to be accessible in your view, you should be using an instance variable.

3

Jordan McKible wrote:

In ruby, instance variables start with an @ and local variables don’t.
What this means in practice is if you want a variable in your controller
to be accessible in your view, you should be using an instance variable.

Makes sense. Thanks for the clearification !

/mich

4

the scope of the variable.

when you create an @var, if will create a global variable, whereas a var
is a local variable => this means that if you create an action in your
controller (lets say:

def foo1
…
blahblah
@var = “something”
…
end

or alternitively,

def foo2
…
blahblah
var = “something”
end

in the view of foo1.rhtml you will be able to see the “something” string
by putting
<%= @var %>, whereas in the view of foo2.rhtml you would not be able to
use
<%= var %> - - if would give you an error like “undefined local
variable/method”

((same works for the view itself, say:

======view.rhtml ==========

<% for @var in @variables %>
…
<% end %>
<%= @var %> # the variable you want , will work, cause the scope of @
is a global one, not a ‘local’ one. . .

whereas:
========view.rhtml =========

<% for var in @variables %>

here you could use it - - this is the scope of the variable, and it

‘dies’ at the end statement.

<% end %>

but not here!

======================

hope this helps somewhat. either way, reading some stuff off of
wiki.rubyonrails.com is a great resource.

later,

s