How do you make Zend Framework NOT render a view/layout when sending an AJAX response?

Question

Zend\'s documentation isn\'t really clear on this.

The problem is that, by default, Zend automatically renders a view at the end of each controller action. If you\'re us

Answer 1

If your AJAX is returning JSON you can use JSON action helper:

$this->_helper->json($data);

This helper will json_encode your $data, output it with JSON headers and die at last, so we getting clean JSON returned from action without layout and view rendering.

f.e. I am using this construction in action beginning to avoid multiple ACL checks for different actions just-for-ajax

public function photosAction() {

if ($this->getRequest()->getQuery('ajax') == 1 || $this->getRequest()->isXmlHttpRequest()) {
    $params = $this->getRequest()->getParams();
    $result = false;

     switch ($params['act']) {
        case 'deleteImage':
           //deleting something
           ...
           $result = true; //ok
           break;

        default :
           $result = array('error' => 'Invalid action: ' . $params['act']);
           break;
      }

    $this->_helper->json($result);
}

// regular action code here
...
}