Building a response

CakePHP is designed to take most of the work out of building applications. However, sometimes you may want to handle things yourself, which the framework can also facilitate.

In this recipe we'll process a response ourselves, generating it exactly as we want.

Getting ready

As this recipe is straight to the point, we'll simply enhance an existing example controller to build our response. For this, open a file named ExampleController.php in app/Controller/ and add the following respond() method to the ExampleController class:

public function respond() {
  if (!$this->request->query('text')) {
    $this->response->statusCode(404);
  }
  $this->response->header('X-Timestamp', date('H:i:s'));
  $this->response->type('txt');
  $this->response->body($this->request->query('text'));
  $this->response->send();
  $this->_stop();
}

Navigate to /example/respond?text=Hello in your browser...