ruby - How to access cookies from ApplicationController (Rails)

Question

I want to access cookies and then perform the same operation regardless of the action or controller.

I don't want to write out a method that gets called from each of my myriad action methods because, aside from being a pain, it doesn't make for very agile code. I'd rather make the call to my cookie-handling method from the ApplicationController class (the superclass for all the controller classes) in application_controller.rb.

However, calling cookies() in the body of the ApplicationController class raises an 'undefined method' error. (I guess that cookies doesn't get defined until later.)

What can I do? Should I overwrite the initialize() method of the ApplicationController and call my cookie-handling method from there? If so, how should I pass the arguments to the super constructor?

P.S. I'm using Rails 2.3.5

Answer 1

It's a hash, not a method:

cookies[:some_key]

... instead of:

cookies(:some_key)