blank page for ajax requests

I want to do an ajax call to check the cart status.

Right now I'm just pulling the cart page and parsing out some data I outputted there. This isn't an ideal solution.

I'd rather be connecting to a blank zen cart page with just the data I require. But how do I suppress all the template stuff around it?

Or alternatively what are the minimum files I need to include in order to include on a custom php page to get the shopping cart status?

I couldn't even figure out how to get to the session outside of a template page

I handle this with creating all my ajax server pages inside a folder AJAX_servers, then calling application_top before everything else, and rewrite the header to xml/text.

I have documented it on:
http://www.webextremecustomiser.com/?p=15

Feel free to download my contribution ajax image swapper, the structure there may be able to help you with that.

Yep. application_top did the trick.

It was stupid of me not to go through the includes on index.php to figure that out.

Thank You.

Great, good luck with the ajax stuff mate