Zend Framework 2: Auto disable layout for ajax calls

Question

An AJAX request to one of my controller actions currently returns the full page HTML.

I only want it to return the HTML (.phtml contents) for that particular action.

Answer 1

Indeed the best thing would be to write another Strategy. There is a JsonStrategy which can auto-detect the accept header to automatically return Json-Format, but as with Ajax-Calls for fullpages, there it's good that it doesn't automatically do things, because you MAY want to get a full page. Above mentioned solution you mentioned would be the quick way to go.

When going for full speed, you'd only have one additional line. It's a best practice to always return fully qualified ViewModels from within your controller. Like:

public function indexAction() 
{
    $request   = $this->getRequest();
    $viewModel = new ViewModel();
    $viewModel->setTemplate('module/controller/action');
    $viewModel->setTerminal($request->isXmlHttpRequest());

    return $viewModel->setVariables(array(
         //list of vars
    ));
}