Planet CakePHP

I’ve been reading hydra’s and djzone’s blog as a reference for starting a cakephp+extjs application. Their tutorials about building the grid using json are almost the same. Following their tutorial step-by-step, I failed to obtained the desired result. That is – a grid showing my data.
I think the root cause of my problem is when calling the url containing my json data, extjs is not able to recognize it as a json data. (Am i going in circles? I, myself, don’t even know how to put this problem in words.)
Coz, when i try to change the url in the data store into a page outside my cakephp app, the data inside the grid shows. But, what the heck, i have to be able to dynamically change the json data based on the content of the users table and having a static json array won’t do. I need, of course, cakephp for this.
So, I’ve been thinking on the points where I did wrong.
Retracing my steps, i think that I have followed hydra’s and djzone’s instructions. I almost wanted to restart my cakephp app from scratch like going back to the versions of cakephp and extjs they used just to see where did I go wrong.
This is when i paid attention to the response received by my page.
And I think I got where my mistakes were.

1. I should have made sure that the page holding my json data contains nothing except the json array. Nothing except it.
2. This means i have to make a blank layout that only contains the following code:  <?=$content_for_layout;?>
3. and i have to assign this layout inside the controller function that will call my json data.
4. This ensures that I get a page with no excess tags.
5. Next, I have to configure my /app/config/core.php and set debug to 0.
6. This step, i think is what made me go around circles. Since ive set this to 2 because i am a lousy coder so, i need something to tell me what line where i misplaced a single semicolon.

With these, i was able to make my grid work.
This article does not tell you how to build your extjs grid inside your cakephp app, because many good people have been contributing to the community for this purpose. I think, I wrote this just in case, someone like me has been following the blogs of many people and yet still don’t know where they had gone wrong, and maybe they have the same situation as mine.
Kanpai!