Question

I am currently trying to add some parsing methods to a controller method in a Rails 3 application.

I have a controller action as follows:

def control
  @device = Device.find(params[:id])
  <do things>
  parse_return(@returned_data)
end

and I added a custom method to the controller as below (this method would not have any routes and would only be accessible to controller actions):

def parse_return
  <parse data>
end

but this does not appear to allow the parse_return method to be used. Is there somewhere else in the Rails app that I can put re-usable methods?

Thanks!

Answer 1

At a first glance it seems that you fail to render a response. Is it true that control action doesn’t have an associated view?

In this case you have to manually call render in your action. For example, to render JSON response you can do this:

def control
  # ...

  render :json => parse_return(@returned_data),
         :content_type => 'application/json',
         :layout => false
end