After updating to Ruby on Rails 2.0.2 I ran into a problem where old code stopped working. The Ruby on Rails Weblog talks about new functionality to allow for us to use .html.erb instead of .rhtml and .js.erb instead of .rjs.
However it appears they may have broken something. In my project I have a controller with a ‘join’ method ending with this code:
respond_to do |format|
format.html { render :layout => 'join' }
format.js
end
My problem was that the join.rjs file was not called at all when the join action was called with text/javascript in the header (an AJAX call). Instead, the .html layout would always return.
Interestingly enough, renaming join.rjs to join.js.erb did allow for the file to be returned when I made an AJAX call, but RoR did not format it into Javascript.
My solution was to rename the join.rhtml to join.html.erb. Now the Javascript file gets properly executed with both .rjs and .js.erb.
I’m not sure under what exact conditions this bug pops up, but I know I have many other AJAX calls and many other .rhtml and .rjs files working just fine in other areas of my project. However, until this bug (if it really is a bug) is adequately dealt with, this workaround seems to do just fine.
I’ve posted a bug report here.
Edit: According to this forum post, while the original documentation is misleading, the desired format is .js.rjs. This should also solve this problem.