Question

Just trying out a simple rails app, mostly going for an API backend with JSON, heavy client side app. So what i want to do is only render the layout, and have javascript code handle the url, and make the ajax request to get the json data. The following seems to work:

respond_to do |format|
  format.html { render :nothing => true, :layout => true }
end

However, since nothing is meant to render nothing, it feels kinda wrong. Is there a more proper way to just render the layout? Note that my layout does not have a yield.

Answer 1

Try this, this will render the response to a file called sample.html which could be a static html file.

and also you could have this file in a common location, so that you could loaded it to all the actions

have your static content in this page, and if you need a dynamic page you could have a .erb page too

in your method

def index
    @posts = Post.all

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html {render :file => "posts/sample"}
      format.json { render json: @posts }
    end
end

/post/sample.html

HTH