Question

Im using ajax .POST to run php script that suppose to return true/false. Im returning true/false using “echo” in my script. But after i get the result back to JS i compare the received text in an IF statement that never works! here is my code

 $.ajax({ url: 'admin_checkuser.php',
     data: {action: window.myId},
     type: 'post',
     success: function(output) {

if (output == "true"){

and here is the php script that being called

include_once('class.MySQL.php');

$userid = $_POST['action'];

$oMySQL = new MySQL();
$query = "Select * FROM videotable WHERE uid = '$userid'";
$oMySQL->ExecuteSQL($query);
$bb = $oMySQL->iRecords;
$aa = $oMySQL->aResult;


if ($bb == 0){
    $query = "INSERT INTO videotable VALUES ('','$userid','true')";
    $oMySQL->ExecuteSQL($query);
    echo 'true';
    exit();
}else{
    $sharing = mysql_result($aa,0,"share");
    echo $sharing;
    exit();
}

I made sure that i receive true\false by doing “alert(output)” and it always displays true\false so i really dont understand why my IF statement fails even when alert(output) shows true

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Trying to parse the type of an ajax response tends to be super unreliable, in my experience.

For that reason, I (now) make darn sure that whenever I write a server side function that is meant for returning ajax data, I keep it perfectly in line with my own set response “standard”, and then set my response type in the ajax method to JSON.

Doing so makes handling errors much more predictable.

An example of a standardized response would be:

$ajaxResponse = array(
  'data' => $someData,
  'result' => true,
  'message' => 'your yadayada was succesful',
  'timestamp' => time()
);
print json_encode($ajaxResponse);

and in ajax, your response would be like:

success: function( response ) {
   if(response.result) {
      alert(response.message);
   }
}