Is there a way in magento to create a block and call its toHtml() method without having to load the entire layout object.
For example, in one of my ajax controllers i want to send a certain block as json output and i am not interested in any other blocks but i am forced to do the following:
$this->loadLayout();
$this->getLayout()->getBlock('my_block_name')->toHtml();
Which loads the entire layout which seems unnecessary.