How best to DRY will_paginate options

will_paginate uses I18n so you can just use that.Given you use English as the default locale the following line should be present in application.rb:

config.i18n.default_locale = :en

you can then change the text of the pagination links by adding the following to config/locales/will_paginate.en.yml:

en:  will_paginate:    previous_label: "← go back"    next_label: "go forward →"

Alternatively you can add them to your default translations file: config/locales/en.ymlbut I have found that it quickly becomes to large to handle.

Note: If you use another locale, for instance es, for this to work you need to at least replace the en: keys within the YAML files to es: and to be concise about naming your files,use either config/locales/will_paginate.es.yml or config/locales/es.yml.

I'm assuming you're doing something like this in your controllers:

will_paginate @collection, :previous_label => '< go back', :next_label => 'go forward >'

Your problem is that you want to use these labels everywhere in your application, so it's pointless to repeat them. In that case, you could define a helper like this:

def paginate(collection, options = {})  defaults = {    :previous_label => '< go back',    :next_label     => 'go forward >',  }  options = defaults.merge(options)  will_paginate collection, optionsend

After that, calling paginate @collection in your views will use your defaults and still let you override them if necessary.

EDIT: suweller's response is definitely the better way to go in this case, especially considering it's approved by mislav, the plugin creator :). I'd completely forgotten about the translation file option. My solution could probably be useful in the general case, when the helper is not configurable in a similar way.