Use of requestAction in the ctp file and it turned out a blank page instead

Question

I am using cakePHP 1.26.
The web page turned out blank when I tried to use requestAction to access a function in a COntroller from a .ctp.
Here is the code:

<?php
class TestingController extends AppController {

 function hello($id=null){

           $IfLoggedIn=$this->Session->check('user');

           if($IfLoggedIn){
            //search the database
            //$result=doing something from the search results
            $this->set('userInfo',$result);
            return "2";
           }

           else if(!$IfLoggedIn && $id!=null){
           return "1";
            }

           else if($id==null){
           return "0";
            }
    }
}

and then in default.ctp file, I made use of the function defined above:

<?php
    $u = $this->requestAction('/hello'); 
    if($u=="2"){
    echo "welcome back, my friend";
    }
    else{
    echo "Hello World";
    }
?>

But when I load a web page, it was blank page.

I have no idea what's wrong in the code.

Answer 1

Try to add

$u = $this->requestAction('/hello', array('return'=>true));

Check this

Answer 2

You might try including the controller in the url param of requestAction.

If you spend more time debugging and reading the manual, you'll learn more, more quickly.

Answer 3

I'm new to Cakephp myself, I'm using 2.0 which may be different in your version of Cake.

I found that the following code from the manual was wrong for me:

<?php
class PostsController extends AppController {
    // ...
    function index() {
        $posts = $this->paginate();
        if ($this->request->is('requested')) {
            return $posts;
        } else {
            $this->set('posts', $posts);
        }
    }
}

You need a slight modification (seems the manual was wrong in this case). The following code worked for me:

<?php
class PostsController extends AppController {
    // ...
    function index() {
        $posts = $this->paginate();
        if ( !empty($this->request->params['requested'])  )  { // line here is different
            return $posts;
        } else {
            $this->set('posts', $posts);
        }
    }
}

We shouldn't be checking for the request HTTP verb, we should be checking if the request parameter is true.

Here's another relevant link to the manual about request parameters: http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/controllers/request-response.html#accessing-request-parameters

Hope that helps.