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

I think the problem is that you're calling setTerminal() on the view model $e->getViewModel() that is responsible for rendering the layout, not the action. You'll have to create a new view model, call setTerminal(true), and return it. I use a dedicated ajax controller so there's no need of determining whether the action is ajax or not:

use Zend\View\Model\ViewModel;
use Zend\Mvc\MvcEvent;
use Zend\Mvc\Controller\AbstractActionController;

class AjaxController extends AbstractActionController
{
    protected $viewModel;

    public function onDispatch(MvcEvent $mvcEvent)
    {
        $this->viewModel = new ViewModel; // Don't use $mvcEvent->getViewModel()!
        $this->viewModel->setTemplate('ajax/response');
        $this->viewModel->setTerminal(true); // Layout won't be rendered

        return parent::onDispatch($mvcEvent);
    }

    public function someAjaxAction()
    {
        $this->viewModel->setVariable('response', 'success');

        return $this->viewModel;
    }
}

and in ajax/response.phtml simply the following:

response ?>