Identifying ajax request or browser request in grails controller

It's quite a common practice to add this dynamic method in your BootStrap.init closure:

    HttpServletRequest.metaClass.isXhr = {->         'XMLHttpRequest' == delegate.getHeader('X-Requested-With')    }

this allows you to test if the current request is an ajax call by doing:

if(request.xhr) { ... }

The simplest solution is to add something like this to your todo action:

if(!request.xhr) {     redirect(controller: 'auth', action: 'index')    return false}

You could also use filters/interceptors. I've built a solution where I annotated all actions that are ajax-only with a custom annotation, and then validated this in a filter.

Full example of grails-app/conf/BootStrap.groovy:

import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequestclass BootStrap {     def init = { servletContext ->        HttpServletRequest.metaClass.isXhr = {->            'XMLHttpRequest' == delegate.getHeader('X-Requested-With')        }     }     def destroy = {     }} 

Since Grails 1.1 an xhr property was added to the request object that allows you to detect AJAX requests. An example of it's usage is below:

def MyController {  def myAction() {    if (request.xhr) {      // send response to AJAX request      } else {      // send response to non-AJAX request    }  }}

The normal method is to have the ajax routine add a header or a query string to the request and detect that. If you're using a library for the ajax, it probably provides this already.

It looks like you're using prototype, which adds an X-Requested-With header set to 'XMLHttpRequest'; detecting that is probably your best bet.