Question

I have a web service from which I receive XML response. In jQuery I have the following, for getting a certain book:

function getBookByIsbn() {

if($("#getAndDeleteIsbn").val() == '')
{
    alert("Please provide the ISBN");
    return false;
}
$.ajax({
    dataType: 'xml',
    type: 'GET',
    url: 'http://localhost:8080/library/books/' + $("#getAndDeleteIsbn").val(),
    success: function (data) {
        var string;
        if (window.ActiveXObject){
            string = data.xml;
        }
        else
        {
            string = (new XMLSerializer()).serializeToString(data);
        }
            $("#messageBox").text(string);
    },
    error: function (xhr, status, thrownError) {
        var string;
        if (window.ActiveXObject){
            string = thrownError.xml;
        }
        else
        {
            string = (new XMLSerializer()).serializeToString(thrownError);

        }
            $("#messageBox").text(string);
  }
});
}

Now, when the request is successful, the message is displayed, but when I receive an error, the content will not be displayed. What am I doing wrong?

EDIT: Someone adviced me to print all the three parameters in the console, so I’ve found out that actually the xhr parameter contains what I need. The problem now is that if I try to create an alert(xhr.responseText), the alert window contains the desired message, but if I want to display the same thing inside the div, nothing happens, and I want it to be displayed there.

Answer 1

The problem was that I tryed to serialize a string to string, because xhr.responseText is a string. To solve the problem, instead of xhr.responseText, it should be xhr.responseXML.
Here is the code:

function getBookByIsbn() {


if($("#getAndDeleteIsbn").val() == '')
{
    alert("Please provide the ISBN");
    return false;
}
$.ajax({
    dataType: 'xml',
    type: 'GET',
    url: 'http://localhost:8080/library/books/' + $("#getAndDeleteIsbn").val(),
    success: function (data) {
        var string;
        if (window.ActiveXObject){
            string = data.xml;
        }
        else
        {
            string = (new XMLSerializer()).serializeToString(data);
        }
            $("#messageBox").text(string);
    },
    error: function (xhr, status, thrownError) {
        var string;
        if (window.ActiveXObject){
            string = xhr.responseXML.xml;
        }
        else
        {
            string = (new XMLSerializer()).serializeToString(xhr.responseXML);

        }
            $("#messageBox").text(string);
  }
});
}