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

Here's the best solution (in my humble opinion). I've spent almost two days to figure it out. No one on the Internet posted about it so far I think.

public function onBootstrap(MvcEvent $e)
{
    $eventManager= $e->getApplication()->getEventManager();

    // The next two lines are from the Zend Skeleton Application found on git
    $moduleRouteListener = new ModuleRouteListener();
    $moduleRouteListener->attach($eventManager);

    // Hybrid view for ajax calls (disable layout for xmlHttpRequests)
    $eventManager->getSharedManager()->attach('Zend\Mvc\Controller\AbstractController', MvcEvent::EVENT_DISPATCH, function(MvcEvent $event){

        /**
         * @var Request $request
         */
        $request = $event->getRequest();
        $viewModel = $event->getResult();

        if($request->isXmlHttpRequest()) {
            $viewModel->setTerminal(true);
        }

        return $viewModel;
    }, -95);

}

I'm still not satisfied though. I would create a plugin as a listener and configure it via configuration file instead of onBootstrap method. But I'll let this for the next time =P