Question

I am currently writing a program that uses AJAX to load a form for editing objects on a website. I have found a similar question at Loading script tags via AJAX, but it doesn’t really satisfy the needs of the program.

The ajax returned is a pre-built set of elements in a form, and when certain areas are called, say, a TinyMCE textarea (which it is), it returns a set of script tags built into the text.

So my question is, is it possible to run through the script tags that have been put in the div and run them?

Plus, I want to avoid using jQuery as it could be running on any number of platforms.

Answer 1

Yes, you can add the incoming html and scripts to the dom, then search the dom for any script tags. You would then eval the scripts and could ignore any jQuery script tags if you wish.

However:

This sort of solution tends to be quite brittle.

It would be much better and more stable for you to modify the Ajax payload into separate html and javascript scripts. That way your Ajax handler would be able to handle them directly without trying to separate them.

Added

Re: how to send back the html and javascript parts: you can either make separate Ajax calls, or return an JSON object that includes both parts. Eg:

{"js": "<the js part of the response>",
 "html": "<the html part of the respons>"}

Use a json library on your host system to take care of the issue of escaping any quotes or other json special characters in either the js or html values.

Returning both the html and js at once saves an Ajax call (which can be significant) and will usually simplify your code quite a bit vs two calls.

I use this technique in production and it works well.