Question

I have come across this snippet in the jquery post documentation and i am not sure what it does

$.post("test.php", { "func": "getNameAndTime" },
 function(data){
   console.log(data.name); // John
   console.log(data.time); //  2pm
 }, "json");

My thinking is that test.php has a function getNameAndTime(),is this the meaning of it?.If so is this some kind of javascript pattern?.

Answer 1

That means, this script is making an asynchronous POST call to test.php page and passing a parameter called func with value getNameAndTime. then it is receiving the response from this ajax server page in a variable called data. I guess the respone is in JSON format. So in the callback function, It is accessing the name and time part from the JSON response and making a call to the console.debug function so that it will be printed in the firebug console.

The JSON may look like this

{
    "name": "Jon",
    "time": "5.30"
}

There may be additional items in the JSON. But for sure our code is expexting a name and time elements

You may refer the below resources to get a good understanding of what each item does

$.post : Load data from the server using a HTTP POST request.

JSON : Javascript Object Notation– A lightweight data-interchange format