Question

When I press a button I perform an ajax post that returns data. That ajax post both updates data and returns a number to tell me whether or not the button should or should not be highlighted. My problem is, I want the ajax post callback function to return both the number and the updated information. This will be easy to do on the ajax file, but I’m not sure how to do this on the callback function. Here is a simple example below.

$.post(ajax_file, 
{
primary_id: primary_id
}, 
function (data){
    //ajax file calls back the number 1 or the number 0. But I want to return more
    //than just that. Maybe an array would work?    
    if (data == 1) 
      { 
      $(the_button).addClass('highlighted');            
      }     
    else if (data == 0) 
          {
          $(the_button).removeClass();
          }         
});  

Answer 1

You’ll want to make your response in a JSON format. Your PHP code will have to respond with some code similar to this –

$response = array(
  'code'=>1,
  'updates'=> $updates // this could be HTML or an array.
);

echo json_encode($response);

Then all you need to do is specify that the data you expect is in JSON format in your post() function.

$.post(ajax_file, { primary_id: primary_id }, function (data){
    if (data.status == 1) { 
      $('.the_button').addClass('highlighted');            
    }     
    else if (data.status == 0) {
      $('.the_button').removeClass();
    }        
    // do something with data.updates 
},'json');