Question

$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "/zzz/bbb/abcd.aspx?deleteIDs=" + request_ids,
contentType: "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
data: '',
dataType: "html",
complete: function(xhr, status) { 

    if (status == "success") 
    {
    }
    else {
    }
}

The jquery code above has its status =”success” regardless of the outcome of the background operation. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

“Success” only refers to the response from the server. If the server response is a 200 response, it will be considered a success, no matter if the business logic on the server side encountered an issue.

You can either return a 400 or 500 error code from the server, or preferably, you send a response back to the JS that contains any error messages.

For example, I usually expect a JSON response from the server. If there was an error on the server side, it contains an error:true flag and I handle it in the JS. So a typical errorless response would be:

{error:false, html:"My HTML in here"}

An error on the server would return:

{error:true, errorMsg: "My error message here"}

EDITed to give an example:

Expecting a JSON response as outlined above, I could do something like this:

$.ajax({
    url: 'test.json',
    dataType: 'json',
    success: function(data) {
        if (data.error) { alert(data.errorMsg); }
        else {
            //do something with data.html
        }
    }
});