Retrieve JSON POST data in CodeIgniter

Question

I have been trying to retrieve JSON data from my php file.Its giving me a hard time.This is my code

Code in my VIEW:

var productDetails = {'id':ISBNNumber,'qty':finalqty,'price':finalprice,'name':bookTitle};

        var base_url = '<?php echo site_url() ?>';
        $.ajax({
            url: "<?php echo base_url() ?>index.php/user/Add_to_cart/addProductsToCart",
            type: 'POST',
            data:productDetails,
            dataType:'JSON',
        });

Trying to retrieve in my Controller:

echo $this->input->post("productDetails");

Outputs Nothing.

Here are my headers:

Remote Address:[::1]:80
Request URL:http://localhost/CI/index.php/user/Add_to_cart/addProductsToCart
Request Method:POST
Status Code:200 OK
Request Headersview source
Accept:application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01
Accept-Encoding:gzip, deflate
Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.8,fr;q=0.6
Connection:keep-alive
Content-Length:52
Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
Cookie:ci_session=3E5SPro57IrJJkjs2feMNlmMrTqEXrTNN8UyEfleeothNnHwNxuCZDSx4a7cJZGjj7fyr2KLpj%2BPNJeGRSzSPVmcFHVEdhSk4D47ziOl4eZcTUAZlQrWa3EYIeQJVWxMpiGZS26MEfbSXNmfel9e8TcsJTreZHipvfisrJovbXEAW4Uv%2BwrJRep1KCi1MMaDCVJb9UEinRVcDtYe%2F86jhn7kOj4kraVmVzx%2FsOaO0rAxLyAUtez%2Feaa4zBwpN3Td153sAoIb3WxVHoEj2oKyH5prVHigbIhIBR6XZqjBkM6hjBuoD2OSZ2wgLbp9DEENMoqui4WYyHROBuS2DYiJajblcS0KiFga5k%2FQOODvE7p6n%2BozN5ciDliVjJ4PnJ5PD1GaPEmec5%2FbQSlOHYWZk%2F2Blzw3Nw0EtLL7wKDzzQY%3Df645c36bb3548eb8de915b73f8763d97a47783ce
Host:localhost
Origin:http://localhost
Referer:http://localhost/CI/index.php/user/view_available_books/viewAvailableBooks/5
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.111 Safari/537.36
X-Requested-With:XMLHttpRequest
**Form Dataview** sourceview URL encoded
id:234
qty:1
price:0.00
name:dasdadsd2q3e!@!@@

My Response which I can See in Developer tools:

    Array
(
    [id] => 234
    [qty] => 1
    [price] => 0.00
    [name] => dasdadsd2q3e!@!@@
)

But in browser, the output is nothing. I am trying to solve it for more than 4 hours now but in vain.

print_r($_POST); // outputs nothing
echo $data = file_get_contents('php://input'); //outputs nothing
echo $id    = $this->input->post('productDetails');// outputs nothing

My View Code:

<script>
    $('#addtoCart').on('click',function(event){
        event.preventDefault();
        $(this).attr('disabled',"disabled");
        finalprice = $.trim($('#price').val());
        finalqty = $.trim($('#quantity').val());

        var productDetails = JSON.stringify({'id':ISBNNumber,'qty':finalqty,'price':finalprice,'name':bookTitle});

        var base_url = '<?php echo site_url() ?>';
        // console.log($);
        $.ajax({
            url: "<?php echo base_url() ?>index.php/user/Add_to_cart/addProductsToCart",
            type: 'POST',
            contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
            data:productDetails,
            dataType:'html',
        });


    });
</script>

Controller Code:

function addProductsToCart(){
        var_dump(json_decode(file_get_contents("php://input")));
        print_r($_POST);
        // $data = json_decode($_POST["productDetails"]);
        // var_dump($data);
        // echo $data = file_get_contents('php://input');
// print_r(json_decode($data));
        // $id    = $this->input->post('id');
        // $qty   = $this

    }

Answer 1

I had the same problem but I found the solution.

This is the Json that I am sending [{"name":"JOSE ANGEL", "lastname":"Ramirez"}]

$data = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), true);
echo json_encode($data);

This code was tested and the result is [{"name":"JOSE ANGEL","lastname":"Ramirez"}]

Answer 2

Although OP seems satisfied, choosen answer doesn't tell us the reason and the real solution . (btw that post_array is not an array it's an object indeed ) @jimasun's answer has the right approach. I will just make things clear and add a solution beyond CI.

So the reason of problem is ;

Not CI or PHP, but your server doesn't know how to handle a request which has an application/json content-type. So you will have no $_POST data. Php has nothing to do with this. Read more at : Reading JSON POST using PHP

And the solution is ; Either don't send request as application/json or process request body to get post data.

For CI @jimasun's answer is precise way of that.

And you can also get request body using pure PHP like this.

$json_request_body = file_get_contents('php://input');