Action-specific exception handler HTML in Rails

Question

I've got a bunch of XHR actions in a controller, which return some HTML to insert into the page. If the response is an error, then it puts the output into a special error div. So far, nothing particularly interesting.

However, this general process doesn't work for Rails' exception handling. If I raise an exception in my XHR actions, I get the generic 500 error handler output in my error div, which looks a bit horrific. While I can catch all possible exceptions in my action and render a more appropriate error, I lose the standard exception logging and notification, which sucks.

So, the only solution I can think of is being able to specify a different 500 handler HTML fragment to use for these specific actions, but I'm not finding much. Anyone got any ideas?

Answer 1

You should be able to check for the 500 status code in your javascript handler and display a generic message like "Server Problem". If there are cases where a more specific error message would be useful to an end user in a production environment, you'll have to catch those exceptions with a rescue_from clause. If you really want to prevent the 500 page from showing, you can override the rescue_action_in_public method on your XHR controller.