Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to return AJAX response Text?
How to return the response from an AJAX call from a function?

So I have a javascript function where I’m doing an AJAX call to see if the user is online or offline. It looks something like this.

function onlineStatus(){

    $.ajax({
        url: "assets/ajax/online-offline.php",
        cache: false,
        success: function(html){
          return html;
        }
    }); 
}

I would like to assign the value from this function as a variable that I can then use.

Something like this.

var test = onlineStatus();

if (test == "true")
   alert("online");
else
   alert("offline");

Is this possible? I must be doing something wrong, but can’t figure out how to achieve this result. Thanks

// Edit:
Thanks for your help everyone, sorry, didn’t realize it may have been a duplicate question. I wasn’t sure what to search for initially, so I didn’t see anything related.

Answer 1

$.ajax is asynchronous so you can’t return anything from onlineStatus, you need to pass it a callback function that can be called when the ajax call completes.

function onlineStatus(callback){

    $.ajax({
        url: "assets/ajax/online-offline.php",
        cache: false,
        success: callback
    }); 
}

onlineStatus(function(test) {
    if (test == "true")
       alert("online");
    else
       alert("offline");
});