CakePHP 3 JSON Views: Setting _jsonOptions special parameter

CakpePHP 3 makes creating JSON and XML views of your data very easy, certainly easier than I remember finding it in Cake 2. However, I found the documentation didn’t make it particularly clear how/where to set the _jsonOptions parameter. All the docs (http://book.cakephp.org/3.0/en/views/json-and-xml-views.html) say is:

“The JsonView class supports the _jsonOptions variable that allows you to customize the bit-mask used to generate JSON. See the json_encode documentation for the valid values of this option.”

It’s actually pretty simple, just put this in your Controller action:

$this->set('_jsonOptions', JSON_HEX_TAG );

I was actually doing this to try to get rid of the JSON_HEX_TAG option, which seems to be set by default. So I actually did this, to unset all the JSON options:

$this->set('_jsonOptions', '');