[Radiant] custom controllers displaying a page from radiant

[orff]

I would love to just be able to call methods in my own custom controller to
display the CMS content, but do things like form handling / database
interaction using rails proper and not have to write behaviors to add
functionality.  I have successfully written my own behavior based off of the
mailer behavior to submit form data to a model, but the whole time what I
really wanted to do was just display a certian page from the CMS with my own
forms / validation / etc happening as rails code.

I played around with a new controller on my dev version calling render with
an injected page part, but could not get it to work without committing the
page part to the database first.  I have since deleted it, but the code was
similar to this (sorry, I dont have the exact code, but I think you can get
the idea)

def index
     @page = Page.find(1)
     custom_content = render_partial 'some_partial'
     @page.page_parts << PagePart.new( :name=>'form',
:content=>custom_content )
     process_page   # this is the part I really cant remember, it was three
lines or so of code
end

Is there anyone from the development team that could give me a hint as to
how to do this, or convince me that custom controllers are a really bad idea
and I should just write behaviors ?  I understand fully there are lots of
things that can do wrong with modifying the page real-time, but it would be
nice to just do my forms in rails with validations, activerecord
relationships, etc. etc.

Debugging behaviors is a real pain because I keep having to re-start my web
server to see new results (even in development mode).  Maybe if someone can
tell me how to fix just this problem I'd be a little more happy to write
behaviors.

-mike
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