jQuery AJAX in Zend Framework

Filed Under (General) by Wenbert on 28-08-2007

Tagged Under : AJAX, jquery, Zend Framework

I have posted a sample code on my wiki on how to submit variables to an action controller. The sample code contains a niffty jQuery plugin - the jQuery Calendar.

Click here for the tutorial.

Update (07-08-2008): For those who don’t know, Zend Framework has built-in stuff for Dojo. So you might want to check it out first. I still prefer jQuery though.

Update (05-07-2008): Since this post has been getting a lot of traffic and the tutorial to my wiki is not that good, I have decided to update this page and post a simpler and shorter tutorial.

So here it is…

The Javascript will look something like this:

//For Edit Action
f u n c t i o n editnote(notes_id)
{
//a sample loading image thingy
$('#notes_entry_id').prepend("
<div id="loading"><img src="http://blog.ekini.net/wp-admin/&quot;+baseUrl+&quot;/images/loading.gif" alt="" /></div>
");
//Get notes from database - in ZF, notes = controller and getnoteforedit = action
$.post(baseUrl+"/notes/getnoteforedit",{
notes_id: notes_id
}, function(data){
$('#loading').remove();
obj = window.eval(data);
$('#textarea_id').val(obj['notes']);
}, "json"); //this returns JSON.
}

Then my controller would look something like this:

    /**
* Get note for action
*
*/
public function getnoteforeditAction()
{
$this-&gt;_helper-&gt;layout-&gt;disableLayout();    //disable layout
$this-&gt;_helper-&gt;viewRenderer-&gt;setNoRender(); //suppress auto-rendering
//the 2 lines above are very important. this action would return html tags from the layout and will look for a phtml file. we disable the layout and suppress auto-rendering of the phtml view files SO that our JSON will be echoed properly to the Javascript...
require_once('models/Notes.php');
require_once('models/UsersNotes.php');
try {
if (!$this-&gt;_request-&gt;isPost()) {
throw new Exception('Invalid action. Not post.');
}
$Notes = new Notes();
$data = array();
if ($result = $Notes-&gt;fetchRow("notes_id=".$Notes-&gt;getAdapter()-&gt;quote($_POST['notes_id'])."")-&gt;toArray()) {
$data['notes_id']             = $result["notes_id"];
$data['notes']                = $result["notes"];
$data['datetime_posted'] = $result["datetime_posted"];
$data['status']               = $result["status"];
$json = Zend_Json::encode($data);    //basically, $data array will also be available in the JS.
} else {
throw new Exception('Note ID not found.');
}
echo $json; //this will echo JSON to the Javascript
unset($json);
unset($data);
} catch (Exception $e) {
echo $e-&gt;getMessage();
}
}

That’s about it…
The $data that was encoded using Zend_JSON in the controller/action can now be accessed in the Javascript after you call the eval().

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3 Responses to “jQuery AJAX in Zend Framework”

Anton Shevchuk on 10 Jun 2008 at 2:13 pm #

I use jQuery-PHP library with ZF, see example on project homepage
Wenbert on 10 Jun 2008 at 2:59 pm #

Thanks Anton. Have you created a proposal for this in ZF? It would be great if this made it to the official ZF release.
kevvy on 17 Aug 2008 at 12:38 pm #

couldnt u you do this in your controller? it works for me:

$this->_helper->json(Zend_Json::encode($array));

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