what is a controller in sinatra?

Question

I was asked why "I was creating complex Ruby variables in my view. Shouldn't have these variables been declared by my controller?"

Is my sinatra controller my .rb file? I have one .rb file and view views.

Answer 1

You can setup the idea of controllers by doing (in 1.9.2) this at the top of your main .rb file

Dir.glob("controllers/*.rb").each { |r| require_relative r }

This will require_relative each .rb file in a folder called controllers/

From there you can implement normal routing like you would've previously done in the main .rb file. Please have a look at rstat.us on Github.

Edit: Rstat.us has gone rails3 and while still helpful you may have to go back numerous commits on the master branch to find how it was used.

Answer 2

Each Sinatra route can be considered its own controller in a typical MVC setup. For your example:

require 'sinatra'
require 'json'
get "/foo" do
  # This might take many lines of excellent code to form your data
  @data = some_complex_array_hash_combo
  haml :foo
end

And then in foo.haml:

:javascript
  var data = #{@data.to_json};