Question

I’m experimenting with MCV using jquery. I’m making a call to an api, which returns data – what I want to do is return the data to a variable rather than call an additioanl function within my model. The following code doesn’t do what I wish though (the_data = result). Any ideas how I can achieve this?

function lookForSomething()
{
    var the_data = $.ajax({ type: "GET", 
                            url: TheUrl, 
                            dataType: "jsonp", 
                            success: function(result) { return result; } 
                            });
    return the_data;
}

Many thanks,
J

Answer 1

If understand you correctly, you want the data returned by TheUrl to be the return value of the lookForSomething.

Technically, you could do this, with the async option:

function lookForSomething()
{
    var the_data;
    $.ajax({ type: "GET", 
                            url: TheUrl, 
                            dataType: "jsonp", 
                            async : false,
                            success: function(result) { the_data = result; } 
                            });
    return the_data;
}

I strongly urge you not to do this. It’s un-Javascript-like and it will lock up the user’s browser while it’s running. Much better to pass in a callback to the function and invoke it from success.