Inheritance in helpers? Or should I do it all in a completel

Hi there.

In the process of learning Rails I’m displaying data from my model in
an HTML table. The view template got really messy so I decided to
build a class to tidy things up and help me with the table generation.
I started out putting it in the controller. But then I thought that
the right place for it (following the MVC pattern and Rails
orthodoxy) would be in a view helper.

But it seems helpers doesn’t define classes but rather methods that
are mixed into to the view class. I stuck some classes in the helper
module and managed to instantiate objects from those classes in my
view but calling built in helper methods (like link_to) from my new
helper objects didn’t go so smoothly.

How am I to do inheritance with helpers? Should I use a hierarchy of
modules? Is that the Rails way of doing things?

alex