This tutorial has a new version, check it out!
> Symfony 2 > Starting in Symfony2: Course 3 (2.4+)
Login to bookmark this video
Buy Access to Course
16.

Come on, Set the Content-Type Header!

Share this awesome video!

|

Keep on Learning!

Start your All-Access Pass

Come on, Set the Content-Type Header!

If you go to the network tab of your brower’s tools and refresh, you’ll find an ugly surprise. Our response has a text/html Content-Type! Silly browser!

Ok, this is our fault. Every response has a Content-Type header and its job is to tell the client if the page is text/html, application/json, or text/turtle. Yea, that’s a real format. It’s actually XML, so not as cute as the name sounds.

Anyways, it’s our job to set this header, which defaults to text/html in Symfony. Use the headers property on the $response to set it:

// src/Yoda/EventBundle/Controller/EventController.php
// ...

public function attendAction($id, $format)
{
    // ...

    if ($format == 'json') {
        // ...

        $response = new Response(json_encode($data));
        $response->headers->set('Content-Type', 'application/json');

        return $response;
    }

    // ...
}

Alright! Refresh again. Mmm, a beautiful application/json Content-Type.

The JsonResponse Class

Ok, so there’s an even lazier way to do this. So throw on your sweat pants, grab that bag of chips and let’s get lazy. Instead of Response, use a class called JsonResponse and pass it the array directly. Oh, and get rid of the Content-Type header while you’re in there:

// src/Yoda/EventBundle/Controller/EventController.php
// ...

use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\JsonResponse;

public function attendAction($id, $format)
{
    // ...

    if ($format == 'json') {
        $data = array(
            'attending' => true
        );

        $response = new JsonResponse($data);

        return $response;
    }

    // ...
}

Refresh again. Yea, we still see JSON and the Content-Type header is still application/json. JsonResponse is just a sub-class of Response, but it removes a few steps for us, and I like that.

Finishing up the Controller

Time to stop playing and finish unattendAction. Just copy the logic from attendAction, change the value to false, and don’t forget the $format argument:

// src/Yoda/EventBundle/Controller/EventController.php
// ...

public function unattendAction($id, $format)
{
    // ...
    $em->flush();

    if ($format == 'json') {
        $data = array(
            'attending' => false
        );

        $response = new JsonResponse($data);

        return $response;
    }

    $url = $this->generateUrl('event_show', array(
        'slug' => $event->getSlug()
    ));

    return $this->redirect($url);
}

When we try it manually, it seems to work!

Removing Duplication

Looking at these 2 methods, do you see any duplication? Um, yea, just about every line is duplicated. We can fix at least some of this by creating a new private method called createAttendingResponse with $event and $format arguments.

Copy in the logic that figures out which response to return:

// src/Yoda/EventBundle/Controller/EventController.php
// ...

/**
 * @param Event $event
 * @param string $format
 * @return \Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response
 */
private function createAttendingResponse(Event $event, $format)
{
    if ($format == 'json') {
        $data = array(
            'attending' => $event->hasAttendee($this->getUser())
        );

        $response = new JsonResponse($data);

        return $response;
    }

    $url = $this->generateUrl('event_show', array(
        'slug' => $event->getSlug()
    ));

    return $this->redirect($url);
}

For the attending value, why not just use our hasAttendee method to figure this out?

Sweet, let’s do my favorite thing – delete some code! Call the new method in attendAction and unattendAction and return its value.

We can use this function to easily generate the JSON response for both controllers:

// src/Yoda/EventBundle/Controller/EventController.php
// ...

public function attendAction($id, $format)
{
    // ...

    return $this->createAttendingResponse($event, $format);
}

public function unattendAction($id, $format)
{
    // ...

    return $this->createAttendingResponse($event, $format);
}

Try it out! Isn’t it nice when things don’t break?