From a web application point of view, you're usually done after you deliver some content to the client, which in Rails means a render or redirect call usually.
For 99.99% of the cases, there'll be a return following a render or redirect inside some "if".
Some might prefer something like
(render login_url; return) unless authenticated?
Others will prefer something more verbose like
unless authenticated? render login_url return end
Others will rely on some undocumented feature of render that might change any time:
render login_url and return unless authenticated?
render (or redirect_to) is not guaranteed to return a truthy value, specially because it really doesn't make any sense for the returning result to have any meaning.
So, I'm suggesting that Rails could support some automatic "return" after each call to render or redirect_to, by calling the method inside a catch-throw block.
For example:
class Dispatcher def dispatch(controller, action) catch :redirected_or_rendered do controller.send action end end end
class AbstractController def render(*args) # or redirect_to do_render(*args) throw :redirected_or_rendered end end
Maybe new method names like render_and_return and redirect_and_return could be added for backward compatibility, although I would really prefer to use render and redirect_to with this behavior built-in.
Maybe we could add some option like "Rails.application.config.automatic_return_from_render_or_redirect = true".
Is there any interest on adding such behavior to Rails?
Cheers,
Rodrigo.