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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-14T07:52:38+00:00

I know this question has been asked in part a few other times on

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I know this question has been asked in part a few other times on SO but I was curious about doing it a different way. In my Ruby on Rails app I have an action called list on my UsersController.rb controller. I want this list to respond to 3 different things

  1. The page itself. Rending the whole page of users I specify
  2. A JSON list of users for the page I specify
  3. A partial view of just the rows for the page I’m specifying formatted as HTML.

Imagine a full page (header, footer, everything) with a table that has page 1 of users. When I click page 2 I want to kick off an ajax request back to the same controller action to give me just the html rows for page 2. I also want to persist my JSON API still allowing my controller to return JSON lists when asked. I imagine it looking someting like this.

class UsersController < ApplicationController
    def list
        respond_to do |format|
            format.html # RETURNS MY VIEW
            format.json # RETURNS MY JSON LIST
            format.partial_html # RETURNS MY PARTIAL HTML
        end
    end
end

Is there anyway to accomplish this in RoR? Or am I doomed into having to create another action in my controller just to return technically the same data?

Could I make this happen by specifying my own MIME type? Should I snake in the partial as an XML return type?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    1. Use format.js on the third line.
    2. Put the partial html on a partial, call it app/views/users/_html_rows.html.erb.
    3. render that partial both on the full html and on the js version.

    You will have app/views/users/list.html.erb with the full html content, which will be something like this:

    <html>
<body>
.....
<table id="my_table"><%= render 'users/html_rows', users: @users %></table>
</body>
</html>

    You will have app/views/users/_html_rows.html.erb with:

    <tbody>
  <% users.each do |user| %>
    <tr>
      <td>user.name</td>
    </tr>
</tbody>

    Then you will have app/views/users/list.js.erb with:

    $("#my_table tbody").html("<%= render 'users/html_rows', users: @users %>");

    This probably will solve your problem.

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