When to include format inside file name for view templates

Question

I have two identical controllers Submissions and Activities, both using the default resource mapping for routes. I want to use some RJS for the show method, both of which can be accessed as such as a GET request:

/submissions/1.js
/activities/1.js

I have show.rjs inside their respective view folders like so:

../submissions/show.rjs
../activities/show.rjs

Out of the box, this works for activities but not for submissions. To fix it, I had to rename show.rjs to show.js.rjs.

Why is this so? I have noticed a similar occurrence for HTML files but am not able to reproduce it. Is there some configuration apart from the routes that I am unaware of that is doing this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Since Rails 2.X there is .js.erb for javascript and .html.erb for HTML and so on. You should use these extensions.

Answer 2

It is related to ActionController responds_to:

Rails determines the desired response format from the HTTP Accept header submitted by the client.

If you are using RESTful controllers you need a respond_to block in the controller action with a view file for each response type with the correct file extension pattern.

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/MimeResponds/InstanceMethods.html