Question

I have an issue with jQuery, where trying to fetch an XML document it comes back as #document in the console as opposed to an object I can act on. Why is this?

Here is my JavaScript code:

$.get('/ingredients/view_xml/' + ingredientId, function(xml) {
    console.log(xml);
}, 'xml');

And here is the XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<ingredient>
    <entryId>700</entryId>
    <title>GUINEA FOWL WHOLE FRESH X 1.5KG</title>
    <ingredientUnit>KG</ingredientUnit>
    <ingredientCost>5.03</ingredientCost>
</ingredient>

Any help would be greatly appreciated, even if it is a n00b mistake I’ve made and can’t see right now!

Answer 1

This is the intended behaviour, see documentation:

dataType
Default: Intelligent Guess (xml, json, script, or html)

The type of data that you’re expecting back from the server.
If none is specified, jQuery will try to infer it based on the
MIME type of the response (an XML MIME type will yield XML, in
1.4 JSON will yield a JavaScript object, in 1.4 script will
execute the script, and anything else will be returned as a
string). The available types (and the result passed as the first
argument to your success callback) are:

“xml”: Returns a XML document that can be processed via jQuery.
[…]

Further, the document is parsed using jQuery.parseXML() which is simply a wrapper around the browser’s “native” XML parsing. The resulting document can be traversed and manipulated using the DOM, or, more conveniently, using jQuery. Example from doc:

var xml = "<rss version='2.0'><channel><title>RSS Title</title></channel></rss>",
    xmlDoc = $.parseXML( xml ),
    $xml = $( xmlDoc ),
    $title = $xml.find( "title" );

/* append "RSS Title" to #someElement */
$( "#someElement" ).append( $title.text() );
// ...