ruby on rails - Weird "406 not acceptable" error

Question

When I try to hit this action via Javascript, I get a 406 Not Acceptable error:

  def show
    @annotation = Annotation.find_by_id(params[:id])

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html {
         if @annotation.blank?
           redirect_to root_path
         else
           redirect_to inline_annotation_path(@annotation)
         end
       }

       format.js {
         if params[:format] == "raw"
           render :text => @annotation.body.to_s
         else
           render :text => @annotation.body.to_html
         end
       }
    end
  end

This is from jQuery, but I'm doing the right beforeSend stuff:

  $.ajaxSetup({ 
    beforeSend: function(xhr) {
      xhr.setRequestHeader("Accept", "text/javascript");
    },
    cache: false 
  });

Here are my request headers:

Host    localhost:3000
User-Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3
Accept  text/javascript
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive  300
Connection  keep-alive
X-Requested-With    XMLHttpRequest
Content-Type    application/x-www-form-urlencoded

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1414446/weird-406-not-acceptable-error

Answer 1

I cracked the case!

I was sending a format parameter with my get request in order to tell the server to send me markdown instead of HTML. Here's my Javascript:

$.get("/annotations/" + annotation_id, {format: 'raw'}, function(data) {
});

and then I was looking for this parameter in the format.js block:

   format.js {
     if params[:format] == "raw"
       render :text => @annotation.body.to_s
     else
       render :text => @annotation.body.to_html
     end
   }

but apparently a format parameter confuses the respond_to block. I changed it from {format: 'raw'} to {markdown: 'true'} and it works.

I guess this is a bug in Rails?