Missing template blogs/index on Ruby on Rails project

Question

For one of my projects I\'m getting this exception every now and then:

ActionView::MissingTemplate: Missing template blogs/index with {:handlers=>[:rx

Answer 1

Add formats: [:html] to render:

def action
  render formats: [:html]
end

Answer 2

I fixed this issue (a few minutes ago – so far, so good) with this new Rails 3.1 option:

config.action_dispatch.ignore_accept_header = true

As mentioned in this Rails issue. That goes in config/application.rb.

I tested it like so in a RSpec request test (using Capybara):

it "should not break with HTTP_ACCEPT image/*;w=320;h=420 from iPhone" do
  page.driver.header "Accept", "image/*;w=320;h=420"
  visit "/some/path"
  page.should have_content("Some content")
end

Answer 3

I did this: In my controller, I put a before filter:

def acceptable_mime_type
  unless request.accepts.detect{|a| a == :json || a == :html} || request.accepts.include?(nil)
    if request.accepts.detect{|a| a.to_s().include?("*/*")}
      ActionDispatch::Request.ignore_accept_header = true
    else
      render text: "Unacceptable", status: 406
      false
    end
  end
end

It checks for my supported types (e.g. json, html) and nil (nil renders default html), then if those mime types aren't supported, it checks for "/" in the header. If it finds it, I force rails to render the default mime type by ignoring the accept header.

To test this in rspec, I had to do this:

describe 'bad header' do
  describe 'accept' do
    let(:mimeTypes) { ["application/text, application/octet-stream"] }

    it 'should return a 406 status code' do
      request.accept = mimeTypes
      get 'index'
      expect(response.response_code).to eq 406
    end

    describe 'with */* included' do
      it 'should return a 200 status code' do
        request.accept = ["*/*"] + mimeTypes
        get 'index'
        expect(response.response_code).to eq 200
      end
    end
  end
end

For some reason, I was getting problems trying to send accept headers properly in rspec using the methods described here, but I found if I set request.accept to an Array, both my tests passed. Weird, I know, but I'm moving on to the next issue for now.

Answer 4

I would be tempted to rescue the MissingTemplate in your application controller and log the Referrer header to see what's triggering this request. You never know, it might be some obscure part of your own app!

If on the other hand you're confident this is being caused by a robot, have you considered adding the offending URL to your robots.txt file? For example:

User-Agent: YandexImages
Disallow: /your/failed/path

Replacing 'your/failed/path' with the path that the robot is stumbling over. If the robot is struggling all over the place, you could just disallow access to the whole site for that particular robot:

User-Agent: YandexImages
Disallow: /

I think this is a cleaner and lighter approach than implementing a handler specifically to suppress errors from a seemingly badly behaved bot.

Answer 5

I agree about blocking the offending robot, but if you really want to force the response format add a before_filter and set request.format = :html, like this:

before_filter :force_request_format_to_html

private

def force_request_format_to_html
  request.format = :html
end

Answer 6

Here is a stricter response; a suggestion by purp, from the discussion on issue 4127.

class FooController
  rescue_from  ActionView::MissingTemplate, :with => :missing_template

  def missing_template
    render :nothing => true, :status => 406
  end
end