Controller with render :partial returns empty content_type

[yob]

If I render a partial from a controller in a brand new rails 3.2.2 app then the following content type is returned:

Content-Type: ; charset=utf-8

To reproduce, start with a new rails app:

rails new foo

Add a resource

./script/rails g resource person

Fill in the PeopleController as suggested in #5025

class PeopleController < ApplicationController
  def index
    render partial: 'james', formats: :html
  end
end

Add content to the partial

⚡ cat app/views/people/_james.html.erb 
<p>Hello World</p>

Load the action:

⚡ curl -v http://127.0.0.1:3000/people
* About to connect() to 127.0.0.1 port 3000 (#0)
*   Trying 127.0.0.1...
* connected
* Connected to 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) port 3000 (#0)
> GET /people HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.24.0 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/1.0.0g zlib/1.2.6 libidn/1.23 libssh2/1.2.8  librtmp/2.3
> Host: 127.0.0.1:3000
> Accept: */*
> 
* additional stuff not fine transfer.c:1037: 0 0
* HTTP 1.1 or later with persistent connection, pipelining supported
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK 
< Content-Type: ; charset=utf-8
< X-Ua-Compatible: IE=Edge
< Etag: "cb058f946972a4d5413cfee068e298cf"
< Cache-Control: max-age=0, private, must-revalidate
< X-Request-Id: 9089271888581c058a8d3228067b7e1f
< X-Runtime: 0.002992
< Content-Length: 19
< Server: WEBrick/1.3.1 (Ruby/1.9.3/2011-10-30)
< Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2012 02:42:48 GMT
< Connection: Keep-Alive
< 
<p>Hello World</p>
* Connection #0 to host 127.0.0.1 left intact
* Closing connection #0

Here's my environment details:

⚡ ruby -v
ruby 1.9.3p0 (2011-10-30 revision 33570) [x86_64-linux]

⚡ rails -v
Rails 3.2.2

⚡ bundle -v 
Bundler version 1.0.22

⚡ uname -a
Linux gaz 3.2.0-1-amd64 #1 SMP Tue Feb 28 15:35:32 UTC 2012 x86_64 GNU/Linux

[carlosantoniodasilva]

I could reproduce it in a bare controller with render :partial => 'partial' as well:

$ curl -LI http://localhost:3000/test/partial
HTTP/1.1 200 OK 
Content-Type: ; charset=utf-8

[homakov]

DAMN. dude, sorry for wiping your post :( Sorry, I was 99 percent sure github at least checks for owner... but He doesnt :( What a bug-day

[drogus]

Yup, this can be easily reproduced also in tests, I'm checking it

[spastorino]

@yob please check it out that the commit fixes the issue

[yob]

Yep, this seems to work as expected on the 3-2-stable branch

[cantino]

Will this fix be in the next Rails release?

[spastorino]

@cantino yes

[jhilden]

I encountered the same problem.
The only difference in my case is that I didn't specifiy formats: :html explicitly. But it should default to text/html anyway when rendering an .html partial, or? Some information on that, would be very much appreciated.

I would like to test if the patch above would fix my problem, however I'm not quite sure on how I would do that. Is there by chance any guidance on what I would need to do?

[spastorino]

@jhilden please test pointing to 3-2-stable branch in your Gemfile ...

gem 'rails', :git => 'git://github.com/rails/rails.git', :branch => '3-2-stable'

And let me know if everything works for you.

[jhilden]

Thank you for your guidance @spastorino. I installed rails from the 3-2-stable branch just as you told me and it seems to have fixed the incorrect content-type in the browser (where the problem first surfaced, using jQuery.ajax() + Firefox).

However my functional test for this controller action was still broken. Weirdly, in the test the content-tpye in the response header changed from empty to {"Content-Type"=>"text/javascript; charset=utf-8"}, even when explicitly setting :formats => :html :(

In my controller I'm just doing a render :partial => "places/guest_calendar" where the partial is of type .html.haml. And this is my test case:

class CalendarsControllerTest < ActionController::TestCase
  context "show" do
    should "succeed" do
      xhr :get, :show, :place_id => @place.to_param, :for_date => Date.today.beginning_of_month.to_s
      assert_response :success
      # puts request.inspect
      # puts response.headers
      assert response.headers["Content-Type"].include?("text/html")
    end
  end
end

When comparing the HTTP headers of the two different XHRs (from Firebug and from the request object in the test case) I noticed that in the browser the request's HTTP accept header was just */* while in the test case I got this from the request object:

"action_dispatch.request.accepts"=>[text/javascript, text/html, application/xml, */*], "action_dispatch.request.formats"=>[text/javascript, text/html, application/xml, */*]

First, I'm not sure if this is the intended behavior for the xhr test method, and secondly I'm not sure an action should respond with text/javascript in any case if I have explicitly set :formats => :html. Please let me know, if I should be wrong about this, or what I could to do help fixing this.

[drogus]

@jhilden I think that it returns text/javascript because it gets the first mime time that it finds in accept, but I guess it should be text/html as partial is html type, so this may be a bug. I will check it.

[drogus]

@jhilden does this commit looks like something that should fail? It passes for me and I'm not sure what's the difference from your app.

[drogus]

@jhilden also, can you confirm that this also happends outside of tests? You can try with curl -H "Accepts: text/javascript, text/html, application/xml, */*" url

[jhilden]

@drogus I tried it with curl and it's correctly returning text/html. You can find the full output here https://gist.github.com/2213884 Thank you very much for your help.

Do you have any idea what could be the problem/difference in my test? Is there a way to look at the pure HTTP request header (besides the stuff in the request object)?

[drogus]

@jhilden actually I found the problem and it's not only the matter of test. It will fail when you also make it xhr request (in a way that rails understands it) -H X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest. I fixed it here: #5603

Could you confirm that your test now does not fail on fresh 3-2-stable?

The problem is, when you send request headers that I used, ie. curl -H "Accepts: text/javascript, text/html, application/xml, */*", rails thinks that's the browser request and tries to be smart about that ;), so it's actually using all of the available mime types (I will try to revisit that, btw). When it's XHR request, it actually puts :js on the beginning instead of HTML, so that's why it's failing only for XHR. If you try some headers that does not look like browser headers it should also fail with text/javascript content type instead of text/html: `curl -H "Accepts: text/javascript, text/html".

[jhilden]

@drogus now it works with the latest 3-2-stable Thanks a lot!