render doesn't find an html.erb file when called from a xml/atom builder?

I'm trying to put together an atom feed. In trying to keep things DRY it seemed to make sense to render each item in the feed with the same html partial that we used to render it on our website. Unfortunately render doesn't seem able to find the template.

More specifically let's say my controller has an action like this:

  def index     @topics = Datasource.list     respond_to do |wants|       wants.html       wants.atom do         render :layout => false       end     end   end

And buried inside my index.atom.builder there is a call to render shared/topic like so:

entry.content(render( :partial => '/shared/topic', :object => topic ), :type => 'html')

I was assuming this would find the file at shared/_topic.html.erb and render it appropriately. No luck though, it gives me the error:

Couldn't find template file for /shared/_topic in ["/Users/jjb/eng/app/ views"]

If I specify the full filename for the template (/shared/ topic.html.erb) it finds it, but that template has nested "render :partial" calls without the ".html.erb" on the end so they fail with the same error mentioned above.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Why not just change the file extension to something atom compliant (.atom.xml?) What’s in this partial that you want to render?

The partial I want to render is a .html.erb and is used elsewhere on the site for traditional web-browser content. I sort of assumed that changing it to .atom.xml might make it work for the atom feed, but likewise break for traditional web-browser content for the same reason...

sounds like a bug. Have your reported it on Rails Trac?

I found a solution for this - at least in my situation. It seems that making the render call from within a respond_to was causing the problem. By moving it to a seperate action and not in respond_to I worked around this strangeness.