I am trying to send a jquery ajax PUT request that looks like this: $.ajax({ type: "PUT", url: '/admin/pages/1.json', data: { page : {...} }, dataType: 'json', success: function(msg) { alert( "Data Saved: " + msg ); } }); but I get the following error: The error occurred while evaluating nil.name /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.2/lib/active_support/xml_mini/rexml.rb:29:in `merge_elem