Noob Question- Display View In <Div> Via Ajax

Yii 1.1 General Discussion
1

Hi everyone,

I’m new to Yii, and have been given the task of making some enhancements to an existing Yii application.

I’ve racked my brain with this, I’m hoping someone can give me a push in the right direction.

What I am trying to do is this:

There is an existing controller called Reporting, with an action getReports. It is access via /reporting/getReports. It all functions perfectly.

The getReports methods does


$this->render('list', array('reportTypes' => $reportTypes));

, so it outputs everything to a view called ‘Reporting/list’. Just to clarify, the Reporting controller has no model…it uses other models to build the output.

I have been asked to make some changes so this report listing can be loaded on any page via a link on all pages. i.e. you click a link, it does an Ajax call then loads the contents into a div on the page.

I’ve edited the main.php view file an put a link there to call /reporting/getReports. This is where I am confused.

How do I get the view and display it in a div, given it isn’t in a JSON fomat? Is it as simple as doing an ajax call to Reporting/list and dumping the result in the Div? Or do I need to change he getReports method to renderPartial instead? Should renderPartial put the result into a different view file?

I’m sure this is an easy one. I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to get this work.

Thanks.

2

You could do the latter, but you can also output the renderpartial from the controller method by using echo.


echo $this->render('list', array('reportTypes' => $reportTypes), true);

Yii::app()->end();

So the Ajax call calls this new controller action that returns the content of the view and Ajax places it in a div. The new controller action function will probably be a copy of the existing function till the render (or you change the original function this way when you don’t need the original functionality anymore).

3

Thanks for the reply. I actually got it working by doing this in the main.php


                          if (isset($reportTypes)) 

                                $this->renderPartial('//reporting/getReports', array('reportTypes' => $reportTypes));


...

                                echo CHtml::ajaxLink('Rports', array('/reporting/getReports'), array('update' => '#panel-report'));

And in the reporting controller changed it to render partial:


$this->renderPartial('list', array('reportTypes' => $reportTypes));

Is there any benefit to do it your way instead?

4

Not that I can think of.