Make #respond_to implicit in controller actions

Additional reasons for this patch:

• respond_to by itself gives no value besides supplying us with a format object
• respond_to requires that an unnecessary level of nesting
• respond_to is an abstraction that can be abstracted away

+1

I think this is a great patch, removing code that provides no value and just adds noise. I don't see any downsides.

I would recommend changing the naming, instead to say:

def some_action
  respond_to.html {  render ... }
  respond_to.json {  render_json ... }
  respond_to.xml {  render_xml ... }
end

You could easily implement this functionality by simply having respond_to return the format object if you don't pass it a block directly:

def respond_to
  if block_given?
    # ... original respond_to ...
  else
    # ... just return the format object since we'll next be calling .html, .json, etc.
  end
end

This is great. I would add a dep warning to the old way and remove the old block way on the next release from there. That way we can get rid of the block check and some lines of code.

+1

I updated the original patch with Daniel's suggestion of just making respond_to without a block, instead of introducing a new method "format" to the controller.

I like Amos' suggestion for deprecating using a block, but this is not included in this patch. It would be easy enough to add if the core team felt comfortable doing that.

The idea would be that:

respond_to do |format|
 format.html { 
  # this becomes deprecated
 }
end

and

respond_to.html { 
  # this becomes the new default
}

Looks like the old behaviour is still around and the new doesn't work in rails3 beta3. Is this going to make it to rails3 or should it be reassigned to a future release ?

respond_to block is a really unnecessary abstraction. +1