bypass-template-rendering.md

Bypass Template Rendering

Generally when rendering a response to a request in a Phoenix app, the controller will make a render call that targets a specific template. If it suits our needs, we can skip writing a template and bypass the template portion of the response pipeline by implementing our own render function directly in the view module.

Consider the following route and controller action:

# web/router.ex
get "/hello", UserController, :hello

# web/controllers/user_controller.ex
def hello(conn, _params) do
  render(conn, "hello.html")
end

The render call would normally trigger a corresponding template function, but we bypass it by adding the following function to our view module:

# web/views/user_view.ex
def render("hello.html", _assigns) do
  "Hello, World!"
end

Visiting /hello will render a page with the view's layout and the words "Hello, World!".