How do I return JSON data from CodeIgniter to Google Apps Script?

Question

so we've been making a chatbot in Google Apps Script and one of its functions is to display information from a database (hosted online). The script sends a POST request to a controller function in our CodeIgniter program:

function do_post(name, status, duration) {
// Make a POST request with a JSON payload.
var data = {
    'name': name,
    'status': status,
    'key' : api_key,
    'duration' : duration
};
var options = {
    'method' : 'post',
    'contentType': 'application/json',
    'muteHttpExceptions' : true,
    // Convert the JavaScript object to a JSON string.
    'payload' : JSON.stringify(data)
};
var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch('https://www.domainname.com/bot/index.php/bot/process/', options);
Logger.log(response);
return response;
}

The function above successfully inserts a record into the database using our process() controller in CI, but the problem is in our response variable. It's of HttpResponse type and we don't know how to return that type from our controller. We want our controller to return something like {"Response": "success"} to our chatbot but we don't know how. We've tried returning a JSON-encoded array:

public function process()
{
    $_POST = array_replace($_POST, json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), true) ?? []);
    $name = $_POST["name"];
    $status = $_POST["status"];
    $api = $_POST["key"];
    $duration = $_POST["duration"];
    if ($api == api_key){
        $result = $this->bot_model->add_log();
    }
    $res_array =  array("response" => $result);
    // encode array to json
    $json = json_encode($res_array);
    return ($json);
    }
}

And we try accessing var response in our app script using response.getContentText(), but we get something like "string(39)" and then the value of our api_key. How do we access the json data from the response?

Answer 1

You need to set the mime-type of your page so you can serve JSON data by using the set_content_type() method from the Output class.

Check the code

    public function process()
{
    $_POST = array_replace($_POST, json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'), true) ?? []);
    $name = $_POST["name"];
    $status = $_POST["status"];
    $api = $_POST["key"];
    $duration = $_POST["duration"];
    if ($api == api_key){
        $result = $this->bot_model->add_log();
    }
    
    // JSON OUTPUT
    $this->output
        ->set_content_type('application/json')
        ->set_output(json_encode( array("response" => $result)));
  
}