Question

I’m trying to convert form values into XML.
The whole script worked fine in Chrome etc, but IE8 had to ruin it, of course. I first had to change my code because IE was throwing errors on the append function (apparently I had created HTML elements instead of XML elements. So now I think it’s all XML and IE is not whining anymore. However, when I’m trying to convert the XML to a string, both Chrome and IE return undefined (chrome actually shows a blank line in the console.

What am I doing wrong?

 function xmlToString(xmlData) { 

    var xmlString;
    //IE
    if (window.ActiveXObject){
    xmlString = xmlData.xml;
    }
    // code for Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, etc.
    else{
    xmlString = (new XMLSerializer()).serializeToString(xmlData);
    }
    return xmlString;
}   


function saveValues(thisB,formName){
       var xpath = $(thisB).attr("xpath");
       var returnToServer = $(thisB).attr("returnToServer");
       var version = $(thisB).attr("version");
       var now= Math.round(new Date().getTime() / 1000)
       var $root = $($.parseXML("<XMLDocument />").getElementsByTagName('*')[0]);
       var $valuesEl = $($.parseXML('<saveValues xpath="'+xpath+'" returnToServer="'+returnToServer+'" version="'+version+'"></saveValues>').getElementsByTagName('*')[0]);
           $("input").each(function(){
           var name = $(this).attr("name");
               if(name != 'xmlToPost'+formName && name != 'saveValuesButton'){
                   if( $(this).attr("type") == 'text'  || (($(this).attr("type") == 'checkbox' || $(this).attr("type") == 'radio') && $(this).is(":checked"))){
                       $valueEl = $($.parseXML('<value datetime="'+now+'" version="'+version+'" name="'+name+'"></value>').getElementsByTagName('*')[0]);
                       $valuesEl.append($valueEl);
                }
           }
       });

        $root.append($valuesEl);
        var valuesXML = xmlToString($root);
        var postToXMLContent = $("#xmlToPost"+formName).val();
        valuesXML = valuesXML.replace(/savevalues/gi,"saveValues");
        valuesXML = valuesXML.replace("returntoserver","returnToServer");
        //..rest of code
    }

When I log the $root object, Chrome gives me a big object that starts with [<xmldocument>, context: <xmldocument>], which I can expand to find childnodes, that contains saveValues etc. IE just shows [object Object].

Answer 1

An XML serializer expects an XML document, not a jQuery wrapper (which you can see logged in Chrome). So use xmlToString($root[0]);.

Anyway, as jQuery obviously seems not to be designed to work with XML, I can only recommend to use plain DOM methods. It would make your code much shorter.