Question

I’m trying to get my function to return the data it got into another function but it doesn’t seem to work? How can I get it to return the data?

function playerid(playername) {
    $.ajax({
        type: "POST",
        url: "fn.php?playerid",
        data: "playername="+playername,
        success: function(data) {
            //$("#test").text(data);
            return data;
        }
    });
}

I want to use it in another function like this

showBids(playerid(ui.item.value));




function showBids(playerid) {
    $.ajax({
        type: "POST",
        url: "poll.php?",
        async: true,
        dataType: 'json',
        timeout: 50000,
        data: "playerid="+playerid,
        success: function(data) {

            //.each(data, function(k ,v) {

            //})
            //$("#current_high").append(data);

            setTimeout("getData()", 1000);
        }
    });

Answer 1

First of all, your playerid() does not return anything, so what do you want to use? It has only $.ajax() call in it, no return statement (one of the callbacks in $.ajax() has return statement, but see below).

Secondly, JavaScript does some things asynchonously, otherwise every interface element would need to wait to react to user action until the AJAX call returns from the server.

Use event-based approach, by passing callbacks to some functions. Then, after they finish, just call the callbacks passing them the result:

function getplayerid(playername, callback) {
    $.ajax({
        type: "POST",
        url: "fn.php?playerid",
        data: "playername="+playername,
        success: function(data) {
            //$("#test").text(data);
            callback(data);
        }
    });
}

and then use it like that:

getplayerid(ui.item.value, showBids);

(notice function name change since it does not actually return player ID, it gets it and passes it to callback)