Hacking away on a project recently I decided to use the lesser-known HTTP status code 204 No Content. A 204 No Content indicates a successful request, but also that there’s no content to return. I’m using 204’s for responding to AJAX calls to server-side resources for which no content is needed to return. Technically I could use a 200 status code but I want to be as semantically correct as possible.

Using Grails for the project it was super simple to return 204 from my controller. Here’s how you do it:

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class ResourceController {

  def update = {

    // service.update params

    render status: 204

  }

}

That’s it.