Question

I am trying to create an ajax request to a WebService that returns data given some specified parameters in XML. This seems to work well in IE, but Firefox can’t decode the response. I can view the response successfully in Fiddler after decoding also. Here is the code:

$(function() {
    $.ajax({
        type: "GET",
        url: 'http:/localhost/webservice.asmx/GetTags?groupId=10',
        contentType: "text/xml; charset=utf-8",
        dataType: "xml",
        success: function(response) {
            $('#result').html('success',response);
            $(response).find("string").each(function() {
                $('#result').append($(this).text());
            });
        },
        error: function(response) {
            $('#result').html('failure',response);
        }
    });

});

Is there a way to specify that response needs to be decoded? Or any other way to make it work?

EDIT:
@Nikki9696 – it’s not JSON encoded as the data is returned in XML.

@Oleg – The sample XML I can see in the browser if accessing webservice via a URL is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ArrayOfString xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns="http://tempuri.org/">
  <string>tag 1</string>
  <string>tag 2</string>
  <string>tag 3</string>
</ArrayOfString>

The fiddler in TextView returns � and a message

“Response is encoded and may need to
be decoded before inspection. Click
here to transform.”

Once clicked it displays the same XML. I turn off dynamic content compression in the IIS then the XML is visible in fiddler straight away, but FF still can’t cope, so that rules out compression.

I played around with the script a little bit, seems like jQuery can default to or guess some parameters, so dataType, for example, is not compulsory. With these settings I get a success message, however it still doesn’t know what to do with the data. I tried setting dataType to “jsonp” as suggested in some SS thread (can’t find it at the moment, will link it when I do) and the error changes to missing ; before statement, I guess because it’s not JSON object, but XML. Is there a way to set webservice to return a JSON instead?

EDIT 2: I’ve updated url to reflect what actually happened. Sorry I missed it out, made it impossible for anyone to spot it.

Answer 1

Because you use relative URL like '/webservice.asmx/GetTags?groupId=10' you had no problem with different domain. It seems to me that you should just fix a litle your JavaScript code. For example the following code

$(function () {
    $.ajax({
        type: "GET",
        url: '/WebService1.asmx/GetTags',
        contentType: "text/xml; charset=utf-8",
        data: {groupId:10},
        success: function (response) {
            $('#result').html('success:');
            $(response).find("string").each(function () {
                $('#result').append('<br />'+$(this).text());
            });
        },
        error: function (response) {
            $('#result').html('failure:<br />' + response.responseText);
        }
    });
});

works fine in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome. If you need I could post the URL where you could download the whole working Visual Studio 2010 project.

UPDATED: To return JSON instead of XML from the web method you can replace [ScriptMethod(UseHttpGet = true)] to the [ScriptMethod (UseHttpGet = true, ResponseFormat = ResponseFormat.Json)] attribute (in .NET 4.0 you can do the same in different other ways) and modify JavaScript code to the following

$(function () {
    $.ajax({
        type: "GET",
        url: '/WebService1.asmx/GetTagsJson',
        contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
        data: { groupId: 10 },
        //dataType: "xml",
        success: function (response) {
            $('#result').html('success:');
            $(response.d).each(function () {
                $('#result').append('<br />' + this);
            });
        },
        error: function (response) {
            $('#result').html('failure:<br />' + response.responseText);
        }
    });
});