Question

Is it possible to create a separate controller’s action (method) for specific partial view without involving AJAX or without doing as described here? In both these examples the views won’t be partials in Rails notion.

Answer 1

A partial is a fancy name for a chunk of html that isn’t a whole page.

You can render a partial in a controller action thus:

render :partial => “my_partial”

And the chunk will be rendered as contained in _my_partial.html.erb or whatever, and with no layout.

Inside an existing (ERB) template, you can use the same partial like this:

<%= render "my_partial" %>

Which will render the _my_partial.html.erb and insert it at that location.

Apart from that calling render on its own renders a view named after the action calling it, there is no special relationship between action names and view/view template names. You can readily create an action that doesn’t have a view template named after it and vice versa. However if you create an action without a view you must call render at some point in the action and explicitly name the view that is to be rendered, or an error will result.

more details here.