CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ajaxjsondrupaldrupal-7
rybosome
rybosome

Reputation: 5126

How can I return actual JSON using Drupal?

I'd like to implement a simple AJAX function locally that allows me to autocomplete node titles of already existing nodes as the user types. To that end, I need the ability to have an API that I can search on node titles. The problem is that when I output raw JSON, it comes surrounded by tags. So, no matter what I do, I keep getting...

<html>
    <head>
    </head>
    <body>
        <pre style="word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"> {json here}</pre>
    </body>
</html>

I've tried implementing a custom page template that only outputs content already, that produced the same results. Here is how I am currently doing this, in my module file...

<?php

/**
 * Implementation of hook_menu()
 */
function content_relation_menu() {
    $items = array();
    $items['api'] = array(
        'title' => 'Search',
        'page callback' => 'content_relation_get',
        'access callback' => TRUE,
        'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,
    );

    return $items;
}

function content_relation_get($term = '') {
    drupal_add_http_header('Content-Type', 'application/javascript; utf-8');
    $var = json_encode(
        db_query("SELECT nid,title FROM {node} WHERE title LIKE :title LIMIT 5", array(":title" => $term.'%'))->fetchAll()
    );
    echo $var;
    exit(0);
}

How can I return JUST raw JSON?

Upvotes: 8

Views: 9603

Answers (3)

Clive
Clive

Reputation: 36957

The 'Drupal' way is using drupal_json_output() and drupal_exit(). 

$data = db_query("SELECT nid,title FROM {node} WHERE title LIKE :title LIMIT 5", array(":title" => $term.'%'))->fetchAll();

drupal_json_output($data);

drupal_exit();

UPDATE

I've just put your code, as is, into a module and all I get when requesting http://site.com/api is the expected JSON, there are no tags. The problem won't be anything to do with Drupal, more likely to do with server/browser configuration.

This link may help:

What do browsers want for the Content-Type header on json ajax responses?

Upvotes: 10

rybosome
rybosome

Reputation: 5126

This actually DID output raw JSON - Chrome was adding the html wrapping. Viewing the output in command line cURL showed that this did output raw JSON.

Upvotes: 2

Tyler Eaves
Tyler Eaves

Reputation: 13121

Take out the exit(0); and it should work. If your page callback doesn't return anything then the normal theme handlers don't get called so you get raw output.

That said, due to the rather poor performance of Drupal, for decent response times you're better off making a small standalone script that talks to the drupal DB, so you don't pay the rather heavy startup costs of a drupal request when you don't need of that functionality.

Upvotes: 0

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