How are render @users and render 'new' different?

Question

In RoR, I sometimes see:

render @users

or

render 'new' 

How are the two different?

Answer 1

In short, render @users is rendering a collection of objects of type User with a partial file named _user.html.erb, and render 'new' is rendering the new action & is equivalent to render :action => new.

Best to review the Layouts and Rendering in Rails page in the Ruby on Rails Guides to understand how these two work & where they can be used appropriately, and the various in-built assumptions that make these and many other convenient render methods possible.