Laravel angularjs Request::ajax() always false

Question

I'm building application with angularjs and laravel 4. Everything is fine but I need now to allow only XHR requests.

This is what I have at the beginning of my controller. But this statement is always false.

    if (!\Request::ajax())     {         return Response::json(array('halt'=>Request::ajax()));     }; 

In angular I'm using standard $http service.

angular.module('APP') .factory("API", ($http,$q,appClient,apiURL) ->  class FB   constructor:->     this.deferredData = $q.defer();   info: (reload)->     $http(       method: "get"       url: apiURL+'game/'+appClient+"/info"     ).success((res)->       dostuff()     ) 

Answer 1

When doing AJAX calls, the X-Requested-With header is often set to XMLHttpRequest. Laravel's Request::ajax() method is built on top of a Symfony2 method that simply checks for the presence of this header.

In October 2012, Angular.js removed this header because they felt that it was rarely used.

As @Thrustmaster and yourself mentioned in the comments, you need to set:

$httpProvider.defaults.headers.common["X-Requested-With"] = "XMLHttpRequest" 

Answer 2

If you'd rather not modify the front-end angular application (or can't), and would rather modify your Laravel code to differentiate between Angular JS AJAX requests vs. other requests, you can also use Request::wantsJson():

if(Request::wantsJson()) {     // Client wants JSON returned  } else {     // Client does not want JSON returned } 

The wantsJson method relies on the standard Accepts HTTP header (rather than the non-standard X-Requested-With header) for the presence of application/json. As long as Angular JS leaves that in by default and you don't remove it on purpose, this method should be reliable.