ASP.NET MVC - What does IsAjaxRequest() actually mean?

Question

I had previously created a method on my base controller:

public bool IsJsonRequest()
{
    var acceptTypes = Request.AcceptTypes;
    return acceptTypes != n         


        

Answer 1

Specifically, the IsAjaxRequest code can be broken down to the function:

public static bool IsAjaxRequest(this HttpRequestBase request)
{
    if (request == null)
    {
        throw new ArgumentNullException("request");
    }

    return (request["X-Requested-With"] == "XMLHttpRequest") || ((request.Headers != null) && (request.Headers["X-Requested-With"] == "XMLHttpRequest"));
}

Edit - 21st January 2019

I went back to my answer and found that my link to IsAjaxRequest is now broken. I've updated it with the current link but this is the AspNetWebStack repo and as such, is not the MVC v3 version of the code. That said, at time of looking, the code is still identical to what I wrote above.

Answer 2

It checks for the X-Requested-With (HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH) header being set to XMLHttpRequest. This header is set by jQuery and a number of other javascript frameworks when making AJAX requests.