respond_with should exhibit common behaviour for "API" requests, even when a template exists.

Actually, why does the +create+ method respond with the resource, while +update+ (and +delete+) don't? If +create+ were to respond with an empty body and status :created and :location set, that would solve my problem. Any objections to modifying this in rails 3 ?

mime_respond_test.rb has this test:

  def test_using_resource_for_post_with_xml_yields_created_on_success
    with_test_route_set do
      @request.accept = "application/xml"
      post :using_resource
      assert_equal "application/xml", @response.content_type
      assert_equal 201, @response.status
      assert_equal "<name>david</name>", @response.body
      assert_equal "http://www.example.com/customers/13", @response.location
    end
  end

Which shows that when you create something it will respond with the resource in xml format in it's response body.

But in almost all my cases this default response shows a lot of stuff I don't want to expose.

So for me the solution would be to NOT respond with the resource, just like +update+ which doesn't do that either.

Alternatively if that's not the behaviour we want, then if I define a create.xml.builder file to control what gets exposed, then it should use that to build the xml on a successful create, and respond with status code 201. However, it responds with status code 200. The attached test shows this.

Furthermore, when the creation is not successful it should respond with the default API behavior as defined in the method +api_behavior+ in +responder.rb+. The attached test shows this issue too.

Which solution should we go for? As said, my preference would be that on a +post+ it will return with an empty response body always, just like with a +put+. However, this probably breaks backwards compatibility. Can we do that for rails 3.x, as that breaks a lot compared to 2.x anyways?

Last thought: is the reason to respond with the resource after a create that consuming clients might parse it to find e.g. the ID?