Question

I’m building a PHP script that sends an email to people on their birthdays. I also need a small web interface where I can turn the entire program on or off, watch who is celebrating his birthday today and see if any mails could not be send. The php on the server is working, but I’m struggling with the html and javascript interface. Specifically the Ajax request that gets the information from the server. it works fine in firefox, chrome and opera, but in Internet Explorer 8 I don’t get a response from the server. The readyState switches to 4, but the status remains 0 and the responseText is empty.

After googling I found out that a lot of people advice JQuery, but I couldn’t get that to work in any browser. I want to find out more about it, because it seemed pretty easy, but for now I would like to know how to do this without JQuery.

edit

In response to questions from the comments, switching the if and else statements yields the same results. As does changing the connection from ‘open’ to ‘close’, incidentally, it is supposed to be close, I can’t remember why I changed it, probably just trying something out of frustration. Finally I added the server side php code. The server sends back string data in case ‘action’ is switchonoff or, just a header with no text if action is clearlog and a jsonarray if action is initialize. Whatever the request the server’s HTTP status is always 0.

<script type="text/javascript">
function loadXMLDoc(action) {
    var parameters = "action="+encodeURI(action);
    var xmlhttp;
    if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
        xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
    }
    else {// code for IE6, IE5
        xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
    }
    xmlhttp.open("POST",'http://mailer.test/App/postscript.php',true);
    xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
    xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("Content-length", parameters.length); 
    xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("Connection", "open");
    xmlhttp.send(parameters);

    xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function() {
        if (xmlhttp.readyState == 4 && xmlhttp.status==200) {
            if(action == 'switchonoff'){
                document.getElementById("onoffbutton").innerHTML=xmlhttp.responseText;
            } else if(action == 'initialize'){
                var response = JSON.parse(xmlhttp.responseText);
                document.getElementById("onoffbutton").innerHTML=response['onoff'];
                document.getElementById("birthdays").innerHTML=response['birthdays'];
                document.getElementById("errors").innerHTML=response['errors'];
            } else if(action == 'clearlog'){
                document.getElementById("errors").innerHTML="";
            }
        }
    }
}

window.onload = function() {
    loadXMLDoc('initialize');
}
</script>

edit, here’s the php script

<?php 

include "settingschanger.php";
include "customercsv.php";

if (!isset($_POST['action'])) {
$_POST['action'] = 'dummy';
}

$post = $_POST['action'];

if(strcmp($post, "initialize") == 0) {
$settings = new SettingsChanger();
$onoff = $settings->getOnOff();
$csv = new CustomerCSV();
$csv->openFile((__DIR__).CustomerCSV::FILENAME);
$todaysbirthdays = $csv->getTodaysBirthdays();
$birthdays = "";
foreach ($todaysbirthdays as $row) {
    $birthday = "";
    foreach ($row as $data) {
        $birthday .= $data . " ";
    }
    $birthdays .= $birthday . "<br />";
}
$errorLogArray = $settings->getErrorLog();
$errors = "";
foreach($errorLogArray as $line) {
    $errors .= $line . "<br />";
}
$result = json_encode(array('onoff'=>$onoff, 'birthdays'=>$birthdays, 'errors'=>$errors));

header("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");
print $result;
}
if(strcmp($post, "switchonoff") == 0) {
$settings = new SettingsChanger();
$result = $settings->changeOnOff();

header("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");
print $result;
}
if(strcmp($post, "clearlog") == 0) {
$settings = new SettingsChanger();
$settings->clearLog();

header("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");
}
?>

Answer 1

Well, I got the site to work. Instead of a post request I now use a get request and that seems to work. It’s not perfect and I’ll continue looking for a way to do it with a post request, but for now it’ll work.