How to do an almost-postback in rails

I don't know what to call this, except that it is almost-a-postback. I'd like my rails app to be able to receive a request independently from somewhere else on the interweb in the form of:

myapp.com/count?id=45&sex=y
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And to be able to perform some calculations (update some table etc) and not bother to respond back.

The key here is - I just want to perform the action and nothing else, not display any view or redirect to any other page.

I set up a "count" controller, but it wants some view or web page to go to. Then I thought, maybe routes could do it? But that seems like a bad idea to have code in routes.

Any ideas appreciated.

In your method controller do this:

def method_count
  #do calculation stuff
  render :nothing => true
end

This will return status 200 (if everything was ok) and nothing will be rendered.

Don't forget to setup your route in config/routes.rb

For API calls it is a good idea to return only an HTTP status code if no content has been requested. You can do this using the head method in ActionController::Base.

def count
  # do work
  head :success
end

You have to create a controller and put your action into it !

In config/routes.rb :

get "yourcontroller/count"

In yourcontroller.rb :

def count
  #some code treating params
end