Question

I am returning an “Employee” object from my javascript ajax call..

var xhReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhReq.open("POST", "MobileClientService.svc/REST/TestReturnEmployee", false);
xhReq.send(null);

var serverResponse = xhReq.responseText;

What is returned is JSON data. I would like to return an Object that has the structure of my Employee object so I could write in javascript..

var name = serverResponse.Name;

Is this possible to do or is my only choise to parse the returned JSON string? No I cant use jquery (it returns the object fine that way) it must be javascript only.

Answer 1

jQuery automatically parses the responseText into an object when it expects a JSON response.

In vanilla JS, you can parse it with JSON.parse:

var response = JSON.parse(xhReq.responseText),
    name = response.Name;

Include this library also if you need compatibility with IE<=7: Crockford’s JSON2

---

About eval

It’s also possible to use eval to parse the responseText string into an object to have compatibility with IE<=7 as well without including extra code, but eval is evil.

Of course, if your server always echoes well-formed JSON, it wouldn’t be a problem. I’d personally avoid eval and use the proper JSON.parse, but if you want to use eval for the IE<=7 compatibility without including extra code you can do it as follows:

var response = eval('(' + xhReq.responseText + ')'),
    name = response.Name;