Thread

I’ve created a template that outputs JSON like this:

[
{exp:mylib:mytag channel="mychannel" backspace="1"}
  {"entry_id":"{entry_id}","title":"{title}"},
{/exp:mylib:mytag}
]

It works fine when mytag returns data. The response is, e.g.:

[{"entry_id":"252","title":"mytitle1"}, {"entry_id":"218","title":"mytitle2"}]

When the tag returns no entries, I expect the template to output just

[]

. Unfortunately I’m not getting that, I get nothing back from EE at all: zero bytes. When I point the a web browser at the URL the same thing happens.

EDIT: A static .html file served from the same Apache server/virtual host does send empty square brackets, so it’s not just a quirk of the web server.

Please don’t suggest that I use one of the existing json modules (I already am for some stuff), I’d like to know the principle of why EE doesn’t treat this template the way I expect. The way one learns is by understanding, not by implementing non-fixes.

Hi Fritzinger,

I’m unfamiliar with this, but will ping one of our developers to get an answer for you.

Sean

This is a custom add-on?  And are you nesting it in anything?  If it’s custom and you’re not nesting it, you should be able to return whatever you want.  But I suspect I’m not seeing the big picture. 

What’s your mytag method look like regarding returns?

And I may shift this over to the developer forum unless it looks like an issue with nesting.

At the risk of making myself look stupid:

One of the steps I took when debugging this problem was to create a template that literally consisted of just two square brackets:

[]

I would swear that I visited the page in firefox and got nothing, and that I confirmed that the response body was zero bytes with wget and firebug. Based on that behaviour, I concluded that the problem was not my add-on, which yes, is my own code (custom add-on that gives search results ranked by relevance to the query).

However I’ve just tried the same two-bracket template on a different machine (it’s past midnight and I promise I’m not at work 😊) and it totally works as expected there… the elusive empty brackets are printed. So I guess either it’s an environment thing, or I didn’t do what I thought I did on my work machine and it actually is my code at fault. I’ll check in the morning.

Hrm- no, it’s always good to ask.  It almost sounds like you might have been throwing a php error when testing the first time- and depending on output settings you may not have seen it- hence white screen.  But yes- there’s no way the tag itself should be wiping out data outside of the tag unless something is going very, very wrong.

In truth- I’d probably code the return to return the empty brackets upon no results (or make a no_results conditional and put them in that)- but it’s moot to the main issue.  Those brackets should be showing.  If not- make sure you’ve got errors showing on the frontend.  You can even introduce a php error in the test module to make sure you see an error rather than a white screen.

In any case- let us know what you find once you take a closer look.  If something odd is going on- we’ll get it hashed out.