Question

I’m stuck in a rut. I hope some one can help.

Basically, I am building an AJAX mobile web app with jQuery. I am able to parse a specific XML file just fine, but I want the option to parse other XML files based on the link they were clicked on and load them on the fly into the same DIV or UL.

So:

click on Link1, loads XML1
click on Link2, loads XML2

I would like to be able to do this all client side, so no PHP (or is that a bad idea?). This the jquery code I’ve been using:

$(document).ready(function() {          

        $("a.load_ajax").click(loadAjax());

        function loadAjax() {
            var fileID = get('?lineID=');

            var dataID = "xml/" + fileID + ".xml"

            $.ajax({
                type: "GET",
                url: dataID,
                dataType: "xml",
                success: parseXml
            });

            function parseXml(xml) {
                $(xml).find("train").each(function() {
                    $("ul#ajax-output").append('<li>' + $(this).find("time").text() + '</li>');
                });
            }
        }           

});

Its just not working at all. I have been passing the variable using GET in the url. So the link in the HTML goes to /?lineID=SBD_to_Union and it should load the XML file called SBD_to_Union.xml

Making sense to anyone? I’d appreciate some help.

Answer 1

What you seem to be struggling with is obtaining the line from the url in the anchor. Use $(this) to get the href attribute of the clicked link. You could then use a regex, if the url is as described, to remove all but the line id to use in constructing the link for the XML. I presume that the XML is server side and relative to the current url. If not, then you’ll need to adjust the path. I’ve taken the liberty to compress things a bit by putting the functions inline. Edit: and the click handler should return false to prevent the link from actually performing its default action.

$(function() {          

    $("a.load_ajax").click( function() {
        var fileID = $(this).attr('href').replace(/.*?lineID=/,'');

        var dataID = "xml/" + fileID + ".xml"

        $.ajax({
            type: "GET",
            url: dataID,
            dataType: "xml",
            success:  function(xml) {
                $(xml).find("train").each(function() {
                    $("ul#ajax-output").append('<li>' + $(this).find("time").text() + '</li>');
                });
            }
        });
        return false;
    });          
});