ruby on rails - "render :nothing => true" returns empty plaintext file?

Question

I'm on Rails 2.3.3, and I need to make a link that sends a post request.

I have one that looks like this:

= link_to('Resend Email', 
  {:controller => 'account', :action => 'resend_confirm_email'}, 
  {:method => :post} )

Which makes the appropriate JavaScript behavior on the link:

<a href="/account/resend_confirm_email" 
  onclick="var f = document.createElement('form'); 
  f.style.display = 'none'; 
  this.parentNode.appendChild(f); 
  f.method = 'POST'; 
  f.action = this.href;
  var s = document.createElement('input'); 
  s.setAttribute('type', 'hidden'); 
  s.setAttribute('name', 'authenticity_token'); 
  s.setAttribute('value', 'EL9GYgLL6kdT/eIAzBritmB2OVZEXGRytPv3lcCdGhs=');
  f.appendChild(s);
  f.submit();
  return false;">Resend Email</a>'

My controller action is working, and set to render nothing:

respond_to do |format|
  format.all { render :nothing => true, :status => 200 }
end

But when I click the link, my browser downloads an empty text file named "resend_confirm_email."

What gives?

Answer 1

Since Rails 4, head is now preferred over render :nothing.¹

head :ok, content_type: "text/html"

# or (equivalent)

head 200, content_type: "text/html"

is preferred over

render nothing: true, status: :ok, content_type: "text/html"

# or (equivalent)

render nothing: true, status: 200, content_type: "text/html"

They are technically the same. If you look at the response for either using cURL, you will see:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2014 05:25:00 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
X-Runtime: 0.014297
Set-Cookie: _blog_session=...snip...; path=/; HttpOnly
Cache-Control: no-cache

However, calling head provides a more obvious alternative to calling render :nothing because it's now explicit that you're only generating HTTP headers.

---

1. http://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html#using-head-to-build-header-only-responses