Question

I have the following code which displays the user’s zipcode on the page (if you’ve read any of my recent questions, they all pertain to this). The zipcode usually gets displayed, except in some environments where the browser does not support geolocation. In these cases, the page displays nothing, and there are no errors logged to the console.

JS

function getZipCode(geolocation) {
    if (geolocation) {
        geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function (position) {
           $.getJSON(
               "http://ws.geonames.org/findNearestAddressJSON?callback=?",
                {
                    lat : position.coords.latitude,
                    lng : position.coords.longitude
                },
                function (data) {
                    $(function () {
                        $('#zip').text(data.address.postalcode);
                    });
                }
            );
        });
    }
}

HTML

<div id="zip"></div>

Is there any way to error handle this and show an error saying whatever when the script returns no result? I was thinking of putting text in between #zip, but then users whose browser do support it would see that text on load, and even though it would change, it would be a bad UX.

Answer 1

geolocation.getCurrentPosition() takes an optional errorCallback parameter. Use this to display the error.