How do I stop controller execution after using redirect_to? (Using Rails)

Question

I have a controller with multiple actions that take :year and :month as attributes from the URL. I have made a private method check_date to check the date is valid and check the date is not in the future.

def check_date(year, month)   if month < 1 || month > 12 || year < 2000     flash[:notice] = I18n.t 'archive.invalid_date'     redirect_to :action => 'index'   elsif year > Date.today.year || (year == Date.today.year && month > Date.today.month)     flash[:notice] = I18n.t 'archive.no_future'     redirect_to :action => 'month_index',        :year => Date.today.year,        :month => Date.today.month,       :type => params[:type]   end end 

Is there a rails way of ending controller execution after the redirect_to?

Ways I can think of are either to throw an exception after the redirect_to or to return a value from check_date and check it in each action that calls it - something like

def month_index    year = params[:year].to_i   month = params[:month].to_i   if !check_date(year, month)     return   ... end 

But I wonder if there is some nice rails way of doing this. I was half hoping that having called redirect_to rails would recognise I wanted to stop, but that doesn't seem to happen.

Answer 1

You can also do:

return redirect_to :action => 'index' 

and

return redirect_to :action => 'month_index',    :year => Date.today.year,    :month => Date.today.month,   :type => params[:type] 

since it looks nicer than putting return on its own line (IMHO).