Question

I want to do a fire-and-forget jQuery call to a web service.

Basically, I want to send a JSON object to http://myservice.com/uservisits/create and I don’t care to receive any kind of return response. However, we want to use the same service for several of our domains, which means coming up against the cross-domain restrictions tied to Ajax.

How do you do this? There’s a lot out there on JSONP and such, but I don’t need to handle a response. I feel like I’m missing an obvious detail.

Answer 1

The easiest way to send an http GET request is with an image beacon:

var json = encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify(obj));
new Image().src = "http://myservice.com/uservisits/create?JSON=" + json;

And, you can even get a little bit of information back by handling the load and error events. Of course, if the response is not an image, the error event will be called, and not load. You can set your service to return a single pixel image to solve that.

Edit: You mentioned you may prefer to use an HTTP POST. It’s not nearly as simple as an image beacon, but you can make a cross-domain post using a hidden iframe:

var frame = $("<iframe>").hide();
frame.load(function() {
    var frameBody = frame.contents().find("body");
    var form = $("<form>", {
        action: "http://myservice.com/uservisits/create",
        method: "POST"
    });
    form.appendTo(frameBody);
    $("<input/>", {
        name: "json",
        value: json
    }).appendTo(form);
    form[0].submit();
});
frame.appendTo("body");

I think jQuery has something like this built in already. You might try digging through the jQuery.ajax documentation. If not, you could probably find a plugin that does it.