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

aimfeld solution works for me, but in case some of you experiment issues with the location of the template, try to specify the module:

 $this->viewModel->setTemplate('application/ajax/response');