How to determine where a request is coming from in a REST api

android, laravel, php, rest

Solution

You can use `Request::wantsJson()` like this:

if (Request::wantsJson()) {
    // return JSON-formatted response
} else {
    // return HTML response
}

Basically what `Request::wantsJson()` does is that it checks whether the `accept` header in the request is `application/json` and return true or false based on that. That means you'll need to make sure your client sends an "accept: application/json" header too.

Note that my answer here does not determine whether "a request is coming from a REST API", but rather detects if the client requests for a JSON response. My answer should still be the way to do it though, because using REST API does not necessary means requiring JSON response. REST API may return XML, HTML, etc.

Reference to Laravel's Illuminate\Http\Request:

/**
 * Determine if the current request is asking for JSON in return.
 *
 * @return bool
 */
public function wantsJson()
{
    $acceptable = $this->getAcceptableContentTypes();

    return isset($acceptable[0]) && $acceptable[0] == 'application/json';
}

Problem

I have an RESTful API with controllers that should return a JSON response when is being hit by my android application and a "view" when it's being hit by a web browser. I'm not even sure I'm approaching this the right way. I'm using Laravel and this is what my controller looks like ``` class TablesController extends BaseController { public function index() { $tables = Table::all(); return Response::json($tables); } } ``` I need something like this ``` class TablesController extends BaseController { public function index() { $tables = Table::all(); if(beingCalledFromWebBrowser){ return View::make('table.index')->with('tables', $tables); }else{ //Android return Response::json($tables); } } ``` See how the responses differ from each other?

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