Question

I am planning on building a lightweight simple MVC in PHP for simple projects.

I am trying to grasp a simple route of showing a View template or returning a JSON response if it is an AJAX request.

Below is a snippet I just came up with, it is all hypothetical so none of the methods actually exist yet, it is just the way I would expect them to work.

Looking at the code below and reading the comments in it, does this look like how you would probably return an AJAX request instead of a view template in a basic MVC?

/**
 * Example Controller
 */
class Test_Controller extends Core_Controller {


    function SomeAction($userId)
    {
        //GET ID from URI
        $this->request->get($userId['id']);

        // load a Model 'some' = Model Name
        $this->profile_model = $this->loadModel('some');

        // Get the Dataset from the Model
        $profileData = $this->profile_model->getProfile($userId);

        // Check if this is an AJAX request true/false
        if($this->request->isAjax()){
            //is AJAX is true then we return json instead of loading a View template
            return $this->response->json($profileData);
        }else{
            // load view file
            $this->view->load('userProfile', $profileData);
        }
    }

Answer 1

I prefer this way in your method:

public function executeSomeAction($request)
{
    if ($request->isXmlHttpRequest())
    {
         $this->actAsJsonResponse(); // here you set headers and other things
         /**
          * $code - 0, if all's fine, other on error
          * $message - verbal message that describe the error, or success
          * $extra - any data to send.
          */
         return $this->prepareJsonResponse($code, $message, $extra);
    }
}

As a result in my framework I have something like:

public function executeSave(\Lighty\Request\Request $request)
{
    $this->actAsJsonResponse();
    $p      = \Lighty\Model\ParticipantSqlAdapter::getInstance()->findById($this->getUser()->getIdParticipant());
    $data   = $request->get('profile', \Lighty\Request\Request::POST, array());
    if (count($data))
    {
        $form = new \Form\Profile(array(
            'default'   => array_merge($p->getAccount()->getArray(), $p->getArray(), $data),
        ));
        if ($form->save($p))
        {
            if (isset($data['tags']))
            {
                $tags = explode(',', $data['tags']);
                array_trim($tags);
                $tags = array_unique($tags);
                $data['tags'] = implode(', ', $tags);
                unset($tags);
            }

            $this->prepareMetaResponse(0, 'Your profile saved successfully', array('updated' => $data));
        }
        else
        {
            $this->prepareMetaResponse(1, 'Passed data is invalid', array('error' => $form->getErrors()));
        }
    }
    else
    {
        $this->prepareMetaResponse(2, 'Not enough data passed');
    }
}

Then you simplify processing request on client side:

if (response.code == 0) {
    // do whatever you need to, on success
} else {
    alert(response.code + ' ' + response.message);
}

Hope that helps.