Rails: How to get the name of the previous action in controller

Question

In rails I need to check the name of the previous method in controller. For example: There are methods A,B,C...etc; In a controller I want to execute a few statements only if it is coming from method A. How to write the condition for this? I have seen many links that says about the current action name and controller name but that was not what I needed. I need to get the name of the previous method. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can use this

url = Rails.application.routes.recognize_path(request.referrer)
last_controller = url[:controller]
last_action = url[:action]

src: https://stackoverflow.com/a/24189831/5063171

Answer 2

You can use request.refererto get the HTTP referral header, which will be the previous visited URL.

However, this is not an ideal way of solving the problem you're faced with, as it's unreliable and will break if your URLs change. If you need to persist information about your user's path through the application, you could try storing variables in the session:

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/action_controller_overview.html#accessing-the-session