Question

I’ve got the following problem: I need to download a JSON file from an API via JQuery / JavaScript. In theory this should be quite basic.

I tried $.ajax and all of its siblings like $.get or $.getJSON. I alway get an 200 OK but my Firebug reports an error. Printing the error just says: “error” – so not that helful.

I read that maybe the JSON file is corrupt. So I tried it with a plain text file (*.txt). Same result.

The JSON file is valid, I check it against a validator.

I also tried ContentType and dateType and experimented with json and jsonp…

I basically used something like this (with a million variations for testing purposes):

$.ajax({
   url: 'http://www.myurl.com/api/v1/myfile.json',
   ...
   success: function(data) {
      console.log(data);
    },
   error: function(error) {
     console.log(error.statusText);
   }
});

Am I missing something important here? It’s really odd that nothing seems to change the behavior of the AJAX-call.

In fact I don’t really need AJAX because I need to grab the JSON file when loading the page…

And the JSON file is not on the same domain as the AJAX caller.

Answer 1

Is that URL located on the same server you’re trying to get the data from?

If not, you ran into a cross-domain request, which can only be handled using JSONP. So, the JSON file itself must be compatible with JSONP format, otherwise jQuery won’t be able to process it (even if you provide a ‘jsonp’ dataType).

P.S.: Firebug will always show response code 200 but give an empty response body for such requests