Move towards best practices

...I made a couple of other small adjustments as well - all minor.

Thanks,

Pobster

Agreed that it's not a page but it is still a callback in the sense that say, an ajax autocomplete is a callback, isn't it relevant for e.g. that statistics hook to fire to count the number of times that callback is fired? It's a backend call which can't be cached with Varnish, it's kind of useful to know that page is being hit x number of times?

I was taking my lead from http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes%21common.inc/function/drupal_e... which states "There should rarely be a reason to call exit instead of drupal_exit();" - I do however agree with what you're saying... TBH though, neither approach is how Drupal is supposed to do it! We're supposed to implement "delivery callback" in hook_menu() (for reference see ajax_deliver or wysiwyg_deliver_dialog_page for a perhaps neater one). I myself think this is absolute balls though... I don't see why every module needs to implement their own ajax-type delivery callback, it makes no sense?! Why isn't this already in core?! Anyways, if you're interested in this approach then this is one I wrote last year sometime;

function example_ajax_deliver($page_callback_result) {
  if (is_null(drupal_get_http_header('Content-Type'))) {
    drupal_add_http_header('Content-Type', 'application/json; charset=utf-8');
  }
  if (is_int($page_callback_result)) {
    switch ($page_callback_result) {
      case MENU_NOT_FOUND:
        drupal_add_http_header('Status', '404 Not Found');
        drupal_exit();
      case MENU_ACCESS_DENIED:
        drupal_add_http_header('Status', '403 Forbidden');
        drupal_exit();
      case MENU_SITE_OFFLINE:
        drupal_add_http_header('Status', '503 Service unavailable');
        drupal_exit();
    }
  }
  elseif (isset($page_callback_result['http_status'])) {
    drupal_add_http_header('Status', (int) $page_callback_result['http_status']);
  }
  drupal_json_output($page_callback_result);
  drupal_exit();
}

(edit)
And then call it using;

function example_menu() {
  $items['api/blocked-user/%user'] = array(
    'title' => 'example I just made up',
    'page callback' => 'example_callback',
    'page arguments' => array(2),
    'delivery callback' => 'example_ajax_deliver',
    'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,
  );
  return $items;
}

function example_callback($account) {
  return array('blocked' => (bool) user_is_blocked($account->name));
}

(edit)

I think you're right though - ignore this one! And thanks, I enjoy the discussion! :o)

Thanks,

Pobster

Yeah ajax_deliver() is really geared towards forms (and only for forms I'd say, I agree there's far too much going on), it's a shame there isn't anything nice and lightweight for simple RESTful JSON responses. I guess that's one of the things driving D8 forward (http://groups.drupal.org/node/226479).

Don't discount the change from hook_init() to hook_page_alter() BTW, the change to renderable content arrays allows other modules to alter the content array if they need to. When it's all hardcoded into hook_init() there's nothing they can do except hack the module.

Thanks,

Pobster

Yep looks good to me! :o)

Thanks,

Pobster