Journal

mini AJAX

March 6, 2007 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | 4 comments

Mini AJAX is a “handy, lightweight” set of AJAX functions recently adopted by theMechanism. While Tim Morgan’s script is well-documented and easy to plug into an existing application, we did find it a bit limiting that it only returns string data (responseText). Since we’re typically accessing XML, it would be nice to have the option of using responseXML.

So, we modified mini AJAX by adding two new methods that do just that:

ajax.getxml(strUrl, strFunc)
strUrl—the URL to query (can contain arguments after a “?”)
strFunc—the function to call once the response is returned
This method uses a GET request to query the specified URL and return a response as an XML DOM object to the specified function.

ajax.postxml(strUrl, strFunc, strArgs)
strUrl—the URL to query
strFunc—the function to call once the response is returned
strArgs—a string containing arguments to be passed to the URL
This method uses a POST request to query the specified URL and return a response as an XML DOM object to the specified function.

20070315 update—Updated mini AJAX after I discovered a function name conflict in Internet Explorer 7. This conflict only occurs if one is using mini AJAX in tandem with Prototype [which we do all the time]. For some unknown reason, this hadn’t been a problem for any of the other browsers [Safari, Firefox on Mac and Firefox, Opera on PC], but it caused the script to fail ignominiously in Internet Explorer.

The updated version of mini AJAX can be found here.

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