CakePHP, Rails respond_to equivalent

What's the best way to output different types of responses f.ex xml, json, html, rss etc. in the same controller action, 开发者_如何学运维and how would I send the preferred content-type to the action?

Ex. rails URLs:

• /user/add.xml = XML output
• /user/add.js = JS/JSON output

Having not really tried to achieve this I'm not too sure, but there is a chapter on this in the book, http://book.cakephp.org/view/174/Request-Handling which looks, at a skim, like it might cover what you need. It seems to revolve around processing the type of request.

I think what you want are web services. Lots of resources online.

ow-easy-are-web-services-in-cakephp-12-really-easy

cakephp-and-restful-web-services