rails 3.1 render_to_string returning empty string

Question

from a controller method, i'm trying to capture the output of rendering a template from another controller.

the view file is located here:

path/to/show.html.erb

in my controller i have:

def create
  html_string = render_to_string :template => 'path/to/show'
  raise 'html string is empty!' if html_string.empty?
  # do some other stuff
end

the view file is very simple, just containing the text 'foo'.

i'm not getting any error about rails not being able to find the show.html.erb file, but html_string is empty, and the error is raised.

i'm seeing this behavior when running the create method through an rspec controller test. i haven't tried the code through the rails server yet.

does anyone see anything i'm missing here?

Answer 1

this turns out to be due to my controller spec missing the important line:

render_views