CakePHP and AJAX submitting a form with jQuery

A couple of years back I wrote an article about how to handle the dependent drop down lists problem using CakePHP's Ajax facilities. Today i will put down a trivial example of how to submit a CakePHP created form using jQuery as a small reference that can be easily pasted.

Let me remind you of the CakePHP ajax way. You start by creating a controller method that will "return" the ajax content. For our trivial example, the following controller will be more than enough.

class AjaxController extends AppController {
   var $name = 'Ajax';
   var $uses = NULL;

   public function helloAjax()
   {
       $this->layout='ajax';
       // result can be anything coming from $this->data
       $result =  'Hello Dolly!';
       $this->set("result", $result);
   }
}

The corresponding view file view/ajax/hello_ajax.ctp should contain just the following:

<?php echo $result; ?>

Setting up our Ajax call is now as easy as, creating a link or a button that will invoke the asynchronous call and then setting the id of the field that will receive the result. A typical setup would be that the link looks something like this :

<a href="#" id="performAjaxLink">Do Ajax </a>

And then the target field can be created using:

<?php echo $this->Form->input('your_field', array('id' => 'resultField')); ?>

Finally a little script at the end of the file ...

<script>
    jQuery("#performAjaxLink").click(
            function()
            {                
                jQuery.ajax({
                    type:'POST',
                    async: true,
                    cache: false,
                    url: '<?php echo Router::Url(array('controller' => 'ajax','admin' => FALSE, 'action' => 'helloAjax'), TRUE); ?>',
                    success: function(response) {
                        jQuery('#resultField').val(response);
                    },
                    data:jQuery('form').serialize()
                });
                return false;
            }
    );
</script>

The jQuery Ajax API is available here.