Question

There’s a controller method in Rails that I want to do nothing for now, so I write

def hide
end

as a placeholder.

There’s a link on a page that invokes this controller. When I click on the link, it says

Missing template posts/hide with {:handlers=>[:erb, :rjs, :builder, :rhtml, :rxml], :formats=>[:html], :locale=>[:en, :en]}

Is it possible to have a controller that really does nothing, and does not render any page (so the user can click on the link and nothing happens)?

Answer 1

Try this:

def hide
  render :nothing => true
end

The server will still be hit, however, and the user will see a blank page. I don’t think this is what you want.

It sounds like you should use jquery to capture the click event and prevent the browser from following the link:

<script type="text/javascript">
   $('#the_link_id').click(function(e){
       e.preventDefault();
       return false;
   })
</script>