Ruby on Rails before_filter vs ruby's initialize

Question

Just a thought in my mind. what is the difference the following

before_filter

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Bas         


        

Answer 1

For each request, you do get a fresh instance of ApplicationController, but the big no-no here is that you're attempting to override core behavior of ActionController::Base#initialize without calling the parent behavior.

ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

  def initialize
    super # this calls ActionController::Base initialize
    init_foo
  end

  private

  def init_foo
    @foo = Foo.new
  end
end

This is not idiomatic Rails behavior though. They give you before_filter for a reason; so use it.