Question

I’m having a trouble since jQuery.ajax, in this particular case, doesn’t seem to happen, so that the function always return NaN undefined as result:

    function requestUploadedSearch()
    {
        var cookie = JSON.parse(readCookie("user_search_cookie"));
        $.ajax({
            dataType: "script",
            async: false,
            data: {
                context: "search-get",
                code: removeNull(cookie, cookie !== null, "code")
            },
            success: function(data)
            {
                return search_return["keywords"];
            }
        });
        delete cookie;
    }

I’ve also tried to write something like

success: function() { return "<nothing happens>"; }

But what I receive is undefined.

Please answer, I’m really freaking out with that.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

What you’re trying to do is fundamentally impossible. Your ajax operation is asynchronous (no it isn’t durrr).

Instead, re-architect your API:

function requestUploadedSearch( callback )
{
    var cookie = JSON.parse(readCookie("user_search_cookie"));
    $.ajax({
        dataType: "script",
        async: false,
        data: {
            context: "search-get",
            code: removeNull(cookie, cookie !== null, "code")
        },
        success: function(data)
        {
            callback( search_return["keywords"] );
        }
    });
    delete cookie;
}

Then, when you invoke it, instead of expecting a return value, pass in a function to respond to the returned data:

requestUploadedSearch( function( value ) {
  // ... do stuff with "value" ...
});

edit — Doh! @nickd is correct; since you’re making the call synchronously (which you really should seriously consider not doing; it’s pretty bad for your user experience) the story is different. Still, however, the approach above would work.