Question

Say I need to use ajax to asynchronously ask the server for an xml file containing relevant data. What is the best practice on what this message should look like? Should it be a string like get_data or something similar? Should it be xml? I don’t really need long polling since its a one-time (or close to it) request.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use standard a HTTP Post or Get to send the request to your server. If you don’t need to specify any parameters to your server side script ( user_id, etc ) then simply appending get_data as a url parameter will work fine.

http://www.domain.com/script?get_data

If you need to send any parameters to the server in order to retrieve data it is best to encode the parameters in JSON or XML and send them as the data portion of your AJAX request. With JQuery and JSON data:

$.ajax({
    type: "GET",
    url: "http://www.domain.com/script",
    data: { key: "value", key2: "value2" },
    async: true,
    dataType: "json",
    success: function( data, textStatus ) { 
        someCallbackFucntion( data );
    }   
});