Question

I’ve got XML coming back from an Ajax.Request in Ajax.Response.responseXML. My XML actually contains XHTML tags which I hope to append into my document.

I’m having issues appending nodes from the responseXML into the current document, however. I suspect that this is because they are XML nodes and not DOM nodes.

Wrapping the responseXML in $() doesn’t seem to return an extended version of the nodes, either, and the documentation doesn’t say that it will or won’t.

Does Prototype provide a way to make use of the responseXML, and if not, is there a cross-browser way to parse the response and use it?

Answer 1

No prototype does not have a native way to parse XML. Nor can you extend the xml with $(xml) and then walk the DOM with .next(),.select(), etc.

Here is an example of what I did recently on a project to manually parse some XML from spell check results. Should get you started.

parseResults: function(results) {
var c = results.responseXML.getElementsByTagName('c');
var corrections = $A(c);
if(!corrections.size()){
  this.link.insert({ after: '<span class="spellCheckNoErrors">No spelling errors</span>' });
  (function(){ this.link.next().remove(); }.bind(this)).delay(1);
  return null;
}
this.res = $A();
corrections.each(function(node){
  sugg = node.childNodes[0].nodeValue;
  offset = node.attributes[0].nodeValue;
  len = node.attributes[1].nodeValue;
        this.res.push(
    $H({
      word: this.text.substr(offset, len),
      suggestions: sugg.split(/\s/)
          })
  );
},this);
this.overlay();
},