I have an action in my controller that I am having trouble with. This is my first rails app, so I'm not sure of the best practices surrounding rails. I have a model called Group and a few actions that go in it's controller. I have written a test that should cause the controller to render an error in JSON because of an invalid Group ID. Instead of rendering and exiting, it looks like the controller is rendering and continuing to execute. Test test 'should not remove group because of invalid group id' do post(:remove, {'group_id' => '3333'}) response = JSON.parse(@response.body) assert_response :success assert_equal 'Success', response['message'] end Controller action # Post remove # group_id def remove if((@group = Group.find_by_id(params[:group_id])) == nil) render :json => { :message => "group_id not found" } end @group.destroy if(!Group.exists?(@group)) render :json => { :message => "Success" } else render :json => { :errors => @group.errors.full_messages } end end In the controller, the first if statement executes: render :json => { :message => "group_id not found" } but @group.destroy is still being executed. This seems counter-intuitive to me, I would think that the render method should exit the controller. Why is the controller not exiting after render is called? The purpose of this block of code is to recover gracefully when no record can be found with the passed in ID. Is this the correct way of doing something like this?