X-Combinator

In Rails, you sometimes need to to break the MVC pattern. In my case, I wanted to take a fully-generated page and extract a certain portion of it in a helper. In this way I was able to base a foreign-channel’s template on my application’s template.
The key to this black magic is ActionController::Integration:: Session.new. Note that in order to use this class you will need to put the following line in config/environment.rb.

Then from your helper function you can GET a page given a url. In the example below I want to extract the portion of the page between begin #{token} and end #{token}