Question

I googled this question and I couldn’t find an answer.

I have a page generated by PHP that generates a JSON string that I use javascript/jQuery/AJAX to retrieve it.

I would like to have a message appear if a user opens this backend page directly by PHP but if retrieved by AJAX it still work as normal.

Is this possible in PHP and what would I be looking at to do this?

Answer 1

Sure, just check the headers to see how it was requested:

if(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) && strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH']) == 'xmlhttprequest'))
{
    /* Do something with the AJAX request */
}
else
{
    /* Do something else */
}

Just check to make sure your server supports HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH. Not all do, though off the top of my head I know Apache 2 does.