Question

I would like to connect my Chrome Extension to my server, and send data back and forth. In particular, when the user clicks a button on the extension when he’s navigating a certain URL, the server checks its database to see how many times that URL has been clicked, increment the count, and send the new count back to the user.

I know that sending the data to the server is possible with an AJAX request, but what about getting the data back from the server?

Answer 1

I think, you may use AJAX for getting updated count in a straightforward manner. For example (with jQuery):

$.ajax({
  url: 'ajax/count.php?url=' + encodeURIComponent(newURL),
  // dataType: 'json',
  success: function(data) {
    // parse you data received from server here
    // data.count
  }
});

So you can “send” new info as parameters of GET request, and get required information from server as http-response. The type of the data used to transfer the count is up to you. For example, this can be json (jQuery provides a shorthand method getJSON, which does the same customized ajax call).

If you don’t want GET, you may use POST and specify data as follows:

$.ajax({
  type: "POST",
  url: "ajax/count.php",
  data: { url: newURL },
  success: function(data){
    // ...
  }
});