How to retrieve the *referring* action/controller

Rails
1

Hi there,

I’m posting because I didn’t find the answer using search engines:

How do I get the name of the action and/or controller that have sent the
user to the current page?

(I know one can access the current action/controller using
controller.controller_name and controller.action_name, but I need to
retrieve the the referring action/controller, meaning “the one
before”…)

Thanks a lot for any help!
Tom

2

You can’t directly find the referring action/controller, but you can get
the referring URL.

request.referrer

The problem in trying to determine the referring action from this is you
have no knowledge of the verb used on the referring URL. For example
/products could be the products index action (GET), or the create action
(POST). HTTP is stateless by nature, so the only way to know the action
truly would be to hack your own state into the session. You could then
set the last action in the cookie as an after_filter, but that would be
rather heavy handed. Perhaps it’s better to review why you need that
info & from there come up with a different solution.

Niels

3

Thanks, Niels!