title: How to access cookies from ApplicationController (Rails)
body: <p>I want to access cookies and then perform the same operation regardless of the action or controller.</p>
  
  <p>I don't want to write out a method that gets called from each of my myriad action methods because, aside from being a pain, it doesn't make for very agile code.  I'd rather make the call to my cookie-handling method from the ApplicationController class (the superclass for all the controller classes) in application_controller.rb.</p>
  
  <p>However, calling <code>cookies()</code> in the body of the ApplicationController class raises an 'undefined method' error.  (I guess that <code>cookies</code> doesn't get defined until later.)</p>
  
  <p>What can I do?  Should I overwrite the <code>initialize()</code> method of the ApplicationController and call my cookie-handling method from there?  If so, how should I pass the arguments to the super constructor?</p>
  
  <p>P.S. I'm using Rails 2.3.5</p>