Rails 3 respond_with custom template

Question

I have a latest action in my controller. This action just grabs the last record and renders the show template.

class PicturesController < ApplicationController
  respond_to :html, :json, :xml

  def latest
    @picture = Picture.last

    respond_with @picture, template: 'pictures/show'
  end
end

Is there a cleaner way to supply template? Seems redundant to have to supply the pictures/ portion for the HTML format since this is the Sites controller.

Answer 1

I've done this similarly to @Dario Barrionuevo, but I needed to preserve XML & JSON formats and wasn't happy with doing a respond_to block, since I'm trying to use the respond_with responders. Turns out you can do this.

class PicturesController < ApplicationController
  respond_to :html, :json, :xml

  def latest
    @picture = Picture.last

    respond_with(@picture) do |format|
      format.html { render :show }
    end
  end
end

The default behavior will run as desired for JSON & XML. You only have to specify the one behavior you need to override (the HTML response) instead of all three.

Source is here.

Answer 2

If the template you want to render, belongs to the same controller, you can write it just like this:

class PicturesController < ApplicationController
  def latest
    @picture = Picture.last

    render :show
  end
end

It is not necessary the pictures/ path. You can go deeper here: Layouts and Rendering in Rails

If you need to preserve xml and json formats, you can do:

class PicturesController < ApplicationController
  def latest
    @picture = Picture.last

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html {render :show}
      format.json {render json: @picture}
      format.xml {render xml: @picture}
    end

  end
end