There are a few things Phoenix.Controller.render does for you:
- It merges your data with the current assigns and converts the result to a map
(views don’t support keyword lists) - It does automatically set the content type for you
- It does dispatching to layout views if you use them
- It calls the view functions, which return iodata, so it can benefit from the performance gain of not building large binaries
- It sends the templated data as response
So it’s basically a shortcut to remove a bunch of boilerplate you’d have to write on your own otherwise.
