Rendering AJAX view in Cakephp - php

Question

I have a method which will render a standard view file index.ctp or an AJAX view file index_ajax.ctp depending on the request type
Within my controller - I have the following code
public function index() {
if ($this->request->is(array('get', 'post))) {
// .... do normal stuff
} elseif ($this->request->is('ajax')) {
$this->autorender = false;
echo 'blah blah'; // this shows
$this->render('index_ajax', 'ajax'); // this does not render
exit;
}
}
The Javascript that invokes this AJAX view is as below
$('#myModal').on('show.bs.modal', function (event) {
$.ajax({
url: '/cake/myController/index',
type: 'ajax',
success: function(data) {
alert(data);
$('#link-list').html(data);
}
});
});
Now the normal index view renders just fine - no problems at all, however the AJAX view is not rendering. If I put an echo statement in the controller, that statement does get outputted to the view but the actual view file itself is not getting picked up and rendered. I am not sure what my mistake is - any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Try this :
if ($this->request->is(array('get', 'post'))) {
// .... do normal stuff
} elseif ($this->request->is('ajax')) {
$this->view="index_ajax";
$this->layout="ajax";
}
After this, look in your layout ajax if you use blocks or something like this which don t show your code or something like that.

Answer 2

Ok - after lots of trial and error and experimenting around, I figure out the solution.
For the original problem that I posted, #mark gave the right answer and I have since then incorporated the plugin available here - essentially, we download and include the plugin mentioned in that link and in the AJAX method in our controller we put a line as below
$this->viewClass = 'Tool.Ajax'
And in your AJAX javascript include the following line that extracts content from the parsed JSON array and embeds in the HTML selector provided
$.ajax ({
url: '/myajaxurl',
type: 'ajax',
success: function(data) {
$('myDiv').html(data.content);
}
});
Vola! the AJAX view now gets rendered. I examined the plugin source code and noticed that Mark has essentially extended the Basic view class and overridden the render method to render AJAX views via a JSON array. However that caused a problem for me since I also had pagination in my AJAX view. So while the links would get rendered fine and the first page would load fine, the second and subsequent pages would load as unparsed JSON array.
To overcome this I had to do a lot of fiddling around and I finally figure out that we need to discard the default AJAX pagination specified within CakePHP manual and use the AJAX pagination provided by Mark at this link (along with the appropriate source code). Essentially, instead of using the default echo $this->Pagination->numbers() we should now use echo $this->element('Tools.pagination') and we should include a javascript that binds the generated pagination links in the following manner -
Assume that pagination links are within a div identified as 'pagination' and these links are generated dynamically by Mark's plugin
$(document).on('click', 'div.pagination a', function(evt) {
evt.preventDefault();
$('#myDiv').load($(this).attr('href'), function(data) {
var res = $.parseJSON(data);
$('#myDiv').html(content);
});
});
Essentially what is happening above is that we are binding each of the pagination links with a different event as opposed to what is automagically generated by CakePHP. So we are loading the content of hyperlink via load method but since a JSON array is returned by AJAX view, we are parsing it and setting the DIV's content accordingly.
Hope this helps someone else down the line!!