CakePHP and jQuery - unobtrusive actions

Question

I am trying to do an unobtrusive action to delete bookmarks in CakePHP. Even though it works just fine, I suspect there should be a better way to do this. Can someone point me in the right direction?

function delete($id = null) { $ok = $this->Bookmark->delete($id); if($this->RequestHandler->isAjax()) { $this->autoRender = false; $this->autoLayout = false; $response = array('status' => 0, 'message' => 'Could not delete bookmark'); if($ok) { $response = array('status' => 1, 'message' => 'Bookmark deleted'); } $this->header('Content-Type: application/json'); echo json_encode($response); exit(); } // Request isn't AJAX, redirect. $this->redirect(array('action' => 'index')); } 

Answer 1

If you plan to make more active use of AJAX action calls, it may be appropriate to use the "overkill" route rather than the "inelegant" route. The following method configures your application to handle AJAX requests pretty elegantly.

In routes.php add:

 Router::parseExtensions('json'); 

Create a new json directory in app/views/layouts/ and a new default.ctp layout in the new directory:

 <?php header("Pragma: no-cache"); header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, max-age=0, must-revalidate"); header('Content-Type: text/x-json'); header("X-JSON: ".$content_for_layout); echo $content_for_layout; ?> 

Create a new json directory in app/views/bookmarks/ and a new view delete.ctp in the new directory:

 <?php $response = $ok ? array( 'status'=>1, 'message'=>__('Bookmark deleted',true)) : array( 'status'=>0, 'message'=>__('Could not delete bookmark',true)); echo $javascript->object($response); // Converts an array into a JSON object. ?> 

Controller:

 class BookmarksController extends AppController() { var $components = array('RequestHandler'); function beforeFilter() { parent::beforeFilter(); $this->RequestHandler->setContent('json', 'text/x-json'); } function delete( $id ) { $ok = $this->Bookmark->del($id); $this->set( compact($ok)); if (! $this->RequestHandler->isAjax()) $this->redirect(array('action'=>'index'),303,true); } } 

On the pages from which AJAX is called, you must change the AJAX requests from /bookmarks/delete/1234 to /bookmarks/delete/1234.json .

It also gives you the ability to handle non-AJAX calls with /bookmarks/delete/1234 with the app/views/bookmarks/delete.ctp .

Any further actions that you want to handle through AJAX and JSON would add the views to the app/views/bookmarks/json/ directory.