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How Rails selects which view to render

Written by August Lilleaas, published October 09, 2008

This is exactly how rails does that:

[action name]
The name of the current action. *show* for /posts/1, *index* for /posts etc.
[mime type]
*html* by default. *js* for /posts.js, *xml* for /posts/1.xml etc. Optional. Leave this out, and rails uses the template for all mime types of that action.
[template type]
Which template engine Rails should use. Chose from *erb*, *builder*, *rjs* and so on.

Some examples of resource paths and the respective template names:

/posts
index.html.erb
/posts.xml
index.xml.builder
/posts/1.js
show.js.rjs

Template type does not have to match mime type

Template types and mime types does not have to match, though, as they do in the example above. *index.html.builder*, *show.xml.rjs* and *update.js.erb* are all valid template names. It means that you can use erb to create XML and builder to create HTML. Your choice.

/posts.xml
index.xml.erb

Optional mime type

The mime type is also optional. The template *index.erb* will be rendered for all mime types.

/posts
index.erb
/posts.js
index.erb

Questions or comments?

Feel free to contact me on Twitter, @augustl, or e-mail me at august@augustl.com.