Add is_ajax to request class

[circulon]

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Is your feature request related to a problem?

Scope: in Controller How do I check if a request was made via ajax or not? The underlying request object from the requests module has a .is_ajax()

Scenario:
I want to make POST requests via ajax from my page. if the POST requests IS NOT ajax I want to redirect the response otherwise return a json data block.
This provides security and specific availability of responses to only certain types of calls.

example code: Assume this Controller has the following Routes

• GET : SomeController@show
• POST : SomeController@check_data

class SomeController(Controller):
    def show(self, view: View):
        return view.render("path.to.show.template")

    def check_data(self, request: Request, response: Response):
        # this stops normal post requests getting some random json data response
        # which doen not look good to the end user and increases security to an extent 
        if not request.is_ajax():
             return response.redirect("/")  
       
      # create some payload that is to be returned to the ajax call
      return {"some": {"data": ["for", "the", "page", "to", "do", "stuff", "with"]}}

What do we currently have to do now?

No ability to access any methods/attributes on the underlying request object that are not wrapped in the Request class eg is_ajax()

Describe the solution you'd like

Just something simple like an is_ajax() method on the Request class to increase usage flexibility.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I could check it like this

if request.environ.get('HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'], "")  !== 'XMLHttpRequest':
    # do redirect

but this feels fragile to me and requires an understanding of the header names and the values assigned to this header attributes

Would this be a breaking change ?

• [ ] Yes

Anything else ?

No response

[josephmancuso]

Will have to check the environ with things like Axios and fetch and see if we can make a method in the request class to check values against the environ