So I was unhappy with the way the trailblazer guide was introducing pages without proper elements (you know, the doctype and head elements?). While it’s admirable that the browser will just give you what a naked div should look like maybe, it’s something that makes me a little sad. I spent a brief time fixing up my controllers to render the cell to string, pass as a variable to the view, and called raw on the code to insert it.

I read the guide through again, and see I either skipped over reading or did not understand the import of this line:

You simply invoke cell the way you did it before, and pass it to render. Per default, render will add layout: true to render the ActionView layout. It can be turned off using layout: false.

Well, all of their early examples have layout false (they’re probably seeking to draw attention to the Cell output in isolation), I only had to remove the layout override, restoring the default, and all would be well (and I wouldn’t need to write a view page for the action in addition to the cell, which was making me feel like I was doing too much work).

I’m back to being happy again.