Question

I thought of having an AJAX module service layer, with controllers and actions that interact with my model. Easy, but not very extensible and would violate DRY. If I change the logistics of some process I’ll have to edit the AJAX controllers and the normal controllers.

So ideally I would load the exact same actions for both javascript and non-javascript users. I have thought about maybe checking for $_POST['ajax'], if it is set I would load a different (json’y) view for the data. Was wondering how/a good way to do this (front controller plugin I imagine?) or if someone can point me to an UP TO DATE tutorial that describes a really good way for building a larger ajax application.

Answer 1

You can actually use the request object to determine if a request has happened through ajax, e.g.:

// from your controller
if($this->getRequest()->isXmlHttpRequest()) {
    // an ajax request, do something special (e.g. render partial view)
} else {
   // render entire view
}

That’s basically testing for the x-requested-with header (which is not always present, depending on JS library, etc). See (under the heading of ‘detecting ajax requests’):

http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.controller.request.html