Simple Yii ajaxLink

This is just a simple tutorial for creating an ajaxLink in Yii. Since I looked all around and there wasn’t anything this straightforward, I thought I’d write it up myself. Feel free to add any comments or suggestions. My goal is to create a link that passes data through POST to one of my controller actions using the Yii AJAX interface. While researching how to do this the “Yii” way, I found no less than 5 different examples, none of which worked, and none of which purported to do exactly what I was looking to do. If you’re just looking for the simple example, here it is. In view that contains the link:

echo CHtml::ajaxLink(
  "Link Text",
  Yii::app()->createUrl( 'myController/ajaxRequest' ),
  array( // ajaxOptions
    'type' =>; 'POST',
    'beforeSend' => "function( request )
                     {
                       // Set up any pre-sending stuff like initializing progress indicators
                     }",
    'success' => "function( data )
                  {
                    // handle return data
                    alert( data );
                  }",
    'data' => array( 'val1' => '1', 'val2' => '2' )
  ),
  array( //htmlOptions
    'href' => Yii::app()->createUrl( 'myController/ajaxRequest' ),
    'class' => $class
  )
);

Make sure to allow the user access to the particular action you’re calling through your AJAX request.

In the MyController.php file:

public function accessRules()
{
  return array(
    array('allow',
          'actions'=>array('ajaxrequest'),
          'users'=>array('@'),
    ),
    // ...
    array('deny',  // deny all users
          'users'=>array('*'),
    ),
  );
}
Now let’s handle that request shall we?
Further along in MyController.php:
public function actionAjaxRequest()
{
  $val1 = $_POST['val1'];
  $val2 = $_POST['val2'];
 
  //
  // Perform processing
  //
 
  //
  // echo the AJAX response
  //
  echo "some sort of response";
 
  Yii::app()->end();
}