How can I display ajax results in a view in CakePHP without including the default template in the ajax response?

Question

I'm doing some experimenting with AJAX in CakePHP and it seems to work except that the view that gets returned includes the default template. How can I get rid of that (or even just specify a different empty template for a view)?

Answer 1

function ajaxFunction() {
    //do stuff
    $this->layout= 'ajax';
}

Ajax is an included blank layout to prevent extra markup being added, exactly what you want.

http://book.cakephp.org/view/96/Layouts

Answer 2

Try using RequestHandler component. This will be handled automatically for you. Then, you can do something like this in your AppController::beforeFilter()

if($this->RequestHandler->isAjax()) {
    Configure::write('debug',0);
}

Answer 3

You will also need to turn off debug output otherwise cake will squirt out all the debug info you usually see at the bottom of the page:

function ajaxFunction() {
    //do stuff
    Configure::write('debug', 0);
    $this->layout= 'ajax';
}