PHP OOP and AJAX: How to handle serverside in Class?

Question

I'm working on converting my standard PHP project to OOP but I ran into a wall about how to handle AJAX calls with PHP Classes. I'm not happy with the way I'm doing this now. I have a TillAjax.php file which I call from my TillUI.php file from a AJAX call.

In the TillAjax.php file I do this to get the information passed from the ajax call.

$till = new Till();
if(isset($_POST['data']))
    $till->doStuff($_POST['data']);

I think this ruins the OOP.

I have worked with ASP.NET MVC and here its possible to call a specific action in a controller without i have to check for the post value. So I want to know if there is a smarter PHP way to solve the above problem?

Alistair Evans · Accepted Answer · 2009-10-04 12:18:55Z

6

The method I use for this is to have an Ajax class.

Your php file calls Ajax::Process($_GET['handle']), where 'handle' contains the name of a static class method, so perhaps 'Till::Process'. The Ajax class checks the function against a list of permitted functions (i.e. functions that you are allowing to be called via ajax), and then uses call_user_func_array to call the function (my code uses the contents of $_POST as arguments to pass to the function). The return of that function is automatically encoded as json and outputted to the client.

This means that your target php file looks like this:

<?php

//File: ajax.php

include ("Ajax.php");

Ajax::Process($_GET['handle']);

?>

Which I think is pretty simple.

Then you can have javascript that looks like this (jquery) :

$.get('ajax.php?handle=Till::Process', {}, function(result) {
  //called on page response
});

So then result now contains whatever data is returned from the php method Till::Process.

answered Oct 4, 2009 at 12:18

Alistair Evans

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4 Comments

imperium2335 Over a year ago

+1 So in the case of a simple input form with validation, one doesn't need to make two functions i.e. validate() that returns a result and validateAjax that echos a result? You can just echo what Ajax::validate returns right?

Alistair Evans Over a year ago

Yes, although the way I've used it is to output JSON from the ajax function, rather than HTML. Obviously you could invoke a function which outputs HTML and display that when the AJAX call completes.

imperium2335 Over a year ago

What if one wanted to invoke a non-static method, would it just be: $.get('ajax.php?handle=class->method'...?

Alistair Evans Over a year ago

The client javascript obviously doesn't know about the instance on which you want to call this non-static method. So you can do it, but the server code would need to create a new instance of the class when it sees the -> operator instead of the ::.

Justin Ethier · Accepted Answer · 2009-10-04 14:03:47Z

1

Have you considered using a PHP MVC framework such as CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Kohana, etc? They will let you route requests to specific controller methods. It will be a much cleaner solution if migrating to one of these frameworks is an option for you.

answered Oct 4, 2009 at 14:03

Justin Ethier

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