How can I bypass view rendering?

Need Help
1

Hey there!!

I have to implement this temporary legacy controller that is attached to the route “/packagelist.json”.
I don’t want to have a route to /packagelist with the option for the extension json
This means I want to completely bypass the whole view thing and dump my own JSON directly from the action on the controller.

So my question, or questions are:

  1. How do I set the appropriate header for application/json. I’m guessing $this->response->withHeader("Content-type". "application/json") but I’m not sure
  2. How do I then dump a string and then just finish the whole thing to be served immediately?

I’m on CakePHP 4.1

Cheers,
Gus

2

Aside from the header, you just return the response with the contents you want.

$json = "{.....}";
return $this->response->withStringBody($json);

I beleive there is withType (i haven’t tried, this is just from memory). You can try

$json = "{.....}";
return $this->response
    ->withType('json')
    ->withStringBody($json);
3

you can disable the view rendering via calling

$this->disableAutoRender();
4

Hey Raul,

Thank you so very much for the reply. This looks like what I really wanted done.

In the mean time I kinda solved it another way, cuz you know, many ways of skinning cats and all…

I used the ajax layout, and on the index.php view I just returned the value of the json.

But your solution is more to the point of what I wanted to do.

Cheers,
Gus

5

Hey Kevin,

Thank you so much for the input. I’ll keep this in mind!!

Cheers,
Gus

6

Hey Raul,

I’ve now tried your suggestion and it works like a charm!!

Again, may thanks for the input, really appreciated!!

Cheers,
Gus