Rails detect if request was AJAX
You can check for a header[X-Requested-With]
to see if it is an AJAX request. Here is a good article on how to do it.
Here is an example:
if request.xhr? # respond to Ajax requestelse # respond to normal requestend
If you're using :remote => true
in your links or forms, you'd do:
respond_to do |format| format.js { #Do some stuff }
You can also check before the respond_to block by calling request.xhr?
.
Update:
As of Rails 6.1.0, xhr?()
does actually (finally) return a boolean value.
Original Answer:
The docs say that request.xhr?
Returns true if the “X-Requested-With” header contains “XMLHttpRequest”....
But BEWARE that
request.xhr?
returns numeric or nil values not BOOLEAN values as the docs say, in accordance with =~.
irb(main):004:0> /hay/ =~ 'haystack'=> 0irb(main):006:0> /stack/ =~ 'haystack'=> 3irb(main):005:0> /asfd/ =~ 'haystack'=> nil
It's based on this:
# File actionpack/lib/action_dispatch/http/request.rb, line 220def xml_http_request? @env['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'] =~ /XMLHttpRequest/end
so
env['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'] =~ /XMLHttpRequest/ => 0
The docs:
http://apidock.com/rails/v4.2.1/ActionDispatch/Request/xml_http_request%3F