Never render a layout in response to xhrs

Question

Most of the time I don\'t want to render a layout when the request comes from AJAX. To this end I\'ve been writing render :layout => !request.xhr? frequently

Answer 1

A normal after_filter won't work because we want to modify rendering.

How about hijacking render?

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

  private
  def render(options = nil, extra_options = {}, &block) 
    options = {:layout => !request.xhr?}.merge(options) unless options.nil?
    super(options, extra_options)      
  end
end

Set the layout when calling render to override it. A bit ugly but should work.