Force controller action not to return an HTTP status code (or render invalid response)

Question

I know that Rails will attempt to render a 200 status code, along with a template matching the controller and action, if I don't call render explicitly in the action.

Is there a way to prevent Rails from doing this, and return no HTTP status code at all? Or, could I have the controller render an invalid response? The short reason is that I am trying to make use of a delegate method in Objective C that fires only when an HTTP request does not receive a valid response.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Or, could I have the controller render an invalid response?

Sure, if you don't want to send any body with your response you could just write in your controller:

head :bad_request

If you want to render and still sends and invalid response code:

 render status: 500
 render status: :forbidden

Everything can be found in the documentation here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html#the-status-option