Question

I have a form that I have been submitting to Salesforce with standard form submit action. By default, you can tell Salesforce to redirect you to a given URL after the POST has completed.

I no longer wish to be redirected since I have other activities on the form page. No problem, my page is already using jQuery so I can use the handy $.ajax utility like this:

$('#wrapper').on('click', '#formsubmit', function(e) {
    e.preventDefault();

    var formData = $('#subForm').serialize();
    $.ajax({
      type: "POST",
      url: "https://www.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.WebToLead?encoding=UTF-8",
      data: formData,
      success: function() {
        console.log('success!'); // or not!
      },
      error:function (xhr, ajaxOptions, thrownError){
                    console.log(xhr.status); // 0
                    console.log(thrownError); // empty
                }
    });
});

In my misguided brain, I imagined that Salesforce would return my good ol’ redirect, which would count as a “success” that I can just discard/ignore. Misguided indeed!

• I can see a 200 OK result (which usually means “success”) but the success callback isn’t tripped.
• The lead is added to the Salesforce database
• Inspecting the content of what’s returned shows zero; there is no content in the response.
• The error callback IS being tripped (despite the 200 OK) but maybe due to intentionally not redirecting it is seen as a “resource not available”? (therefore my status code is 0, and there is no content in the thrownError?).

Any advice on identifying this as a successful POST so that I can trigger additional actions in a callback? I don’t want to TOTALLY ignore the response, or I could end up in a scenario in which I’m acting on a failed POST as if it was successful. I need to capture the success somehow.

It occurred to me that it could be a cross-site scripting issue as well, but since the application doesn’t exchange data in JSONP, I’m not sure how to get around that (and I’m not sure how to identify it in the first place).

Answer 1

Few things here:

1) The redirect response being sent by salesforce’s API is most likely being interpreted as an error code.

2) The response code of the subsequent page (after the redirect) is 200 OK, from the sound of it.

3) It is not possible to do a POST request using JSONP. This is a limitation of JSONP; which is not actually an AJAX request, but an HTTP GET request wrapped inside of a dynamically generated script tag. Also, JSONP only works if the request yields an HTTP response of 200 OK.

I would recommend using your own server-side intermediary to handle your AJAX POST request. This will act as a proxy between your front-end app and salesforce’s API. This will also allow you to better control the response being sent to your app.