Question

I’m using respond_to and respond_with pair in Rails 3 to respond to a DELETE #destroy request. The destroy action is defined in UsersController. It destroy the User specified by params[:id] and respond with a JS template. However, the request keeps failing in RSpec test and I’m not really sure how to fix it.

Here’s a snippet for my UsersController:

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  respond_to :html, only: [:index, :show, :new, :edit]
  respond_to :js, only: [:create, :update, :delete]
  ...

  def destroy
    @user = User.find(params[:id])
    @user.destroy

    respond_with @user
  end
end

And here is the test that keeps failing:

require 'spec_helper'

describe UsersController do
  ...

  describe "DELETE #destroy" do
    before { @user = create(:user); delete :destroy, id: @user.id, format: :js }

    it "return HTTP success" do
      response.should be_success
    end

    it "respond with JS content" do
      response.content_type.should == 'text/javascript'
    end
  end
end

The test “respond with JS content” does succeed, however the test “return HTTP successs” fails. When I use a debugger to check response.code, it is 406. I’m expecting 2xx since the deletion succeed. Is this a normal Rails behavior or do I have something wrong with my code?

Answer 1

Seems you messed up REST delete and controller’s destroy. Rails responder knows nothing about :delete action, change

respond_to :js, only: [:create, :update, :delete]

to

respond_to :js, only: [:create, :update, :destroy]

or pass a block to the responder, instead of

respond_with @user

use

respond_with @user do |format|
 format.js
end