CakePHP: How to use a view element inside of a controller

Question

I\'m trying to figure out how to use one of my view elements inside of a controller...

I know, I know: \"Don\'t do that!\" (99% of the time this is

Answer 1

Sometimes, you need to render a CakePhp element from a view and inject its content into the page using AJAX the same time. In this case rendering element as a regular view from controller is better than creating a dedicated view that just contains element('some_element') ?>, and may be done this way:

set('data', array('a'=>123, 'b'=>456, 'd'=>678));

    // disable layout template
    $this->layout = 'ajax';

    // render!
    $this->render('/Elements/some_element');
}