Question

I’m using Cake 2.1, and with it comes the new JsonView. What I’d like to do is POST to a method in my controller and render an html fragment so that I can return it as a value in json.

Previously I’d do something like this:

public function ajaxSubmit() {
    if (!$this->request->is('ajax')) {
        $this->redirect('/');
    } else {
        $this->autoRender = $this->layout = false;

        $message = 'Please enter a message';
        $this->set('message');
        $errorFragment = $this->render('/Elements/errors/flash_error');
        $toReturn = array('errorFragment' => $errorFragment);
        return json_encode($toReturn);
    }
}

Which only sends back the html fragment of that particular flash_error element such that I can’t have multiple key => values being sent back in a standard json object. I want to be able to send both html fragments and just plain text as json.

So my question really is, how can I render an HTML element and set it with a (key=>value pair) to be sent back as json from my controller using the JsonView that Cake 2.1 provides? I already have set in my routes file Router::parseExtensions('json'); and I’m including the RequestHandler component inside of my AppController.

Answer 1

You shouldn’t need a separate action for AJAX when using data views. Use can use the same action as your non AJAX submit.

However assuming that you wish to use a different action for AJAX because I don’t know what your other action looks like, you can write something like this in app/View/ControllerName/json/ajaxSubmit.ctp.

<?php
$errorFragment = $this->element('errors/flash_error');
$toReturn = array('errorFragment' => $errorFragment);
echo json_encode($toReturn);

Then change your action to this

public function ajaxSubmit() {
    if (!$this->request->is('ajax')) {
        $this->redirect('/');
    } else {
        $message = 'Please enter a message';
        $this->set('message');
    }
}

See “Using a data view with view files” in the documentation.