render :json not setting content type (Rails 3.0.3)

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

I'm experiencing a strange problem on an application this is in the process of being converted from Rails 2.3 to 3.0.3. I have several controllers that are rendering either HTML or JSON depending on the requested format, using respond_to:

respond_to |wants|   wants.html   wants.json {render :json => "blah"} end

One controller works just fine. The other is sending the wrong content type header - "text/html" instead of "application/json". If I remove the respond_to block in the second controller, and just render :json all the time, then the correct type is sent. There are no apparent differences between the working and non-working controllers except the model being retrieved from the database. I've tried reducing the actions down to rendering just a string as JSON (as seen above) and still have the same problem.

Does anyone have a suggest as to what could be happening? How can I trace the response back through the Rails stack to perhaps see where the content type is being set (or not set?)

I can provide more detail if needed.

Thanks!

Pete

2

It took a little while longer, but I found a supposedly undocumented gotcha in Rails 3 that was causing my problem.

The controller in question had a private method "content_type" defined. Apparently that method is already defined for controllers, and overriding it was causing the problem with the MIME type. So, don't define a content_type method in your controller.