View Helper - JSON

Introduction

When creating views that return JSON, it’s important to also set the appropriate response header. The JSON view helper does exactly that. In addition, by default, it disables layouts (if currently enabled), as layouts generally aren’t used with JSON responses.

The JSON helper sets the following header:

Content-Type: application/json

Most AJAX libraries look for this header when parsing responses to determine how to handle the content.

Basic Usage

Usage of the JSON helper is very straightforward:

<?php echo $this->json($this->data) ?>

Note

Enabling encoding using Zend\Json\Expr

The JSON helper accepts an array of options that will be passed to Zend\Json\Json::encode() and used internally to encode data.

Zend\Json\Json::encode allows the encoding of native JSON expressions using Zend\Json\Expr objects. This option is disabled by default. To enable this option, pass a boolean TRUE to the enableJsonExprFinder key of the options array:

<?php echo $this->json($this->data, array(
    'enableJsonExprFinder' => true,
)) ?>