render a blank view in cakephp

Question

i need to prevent a view to be rendered in a specified case but i can't understand how to prevent it to render.

I tried

$this->autoRender=false

but nothing happened, probably because i'm using an API engine that manage rendering differently from regular controllers. Anyone know any trick to do this?

Answer 1

It's an old question. The current cake-version is 3.x and there is a easy way to use a blank layout.

Only add the in the controller:

$this->viewBuilder()->autoLayout(false);

Answer 2

Using $this->layout = 'ajax' does not seem to be enough.

But using these both lines works:

$this->layout = 'ajax'; 
$this->render(false);