Using XMLHttpRequest
In this guide, we'll take a look at how to use
XMLHttpRequest
to issue HTTP
requests in order to exchange data between the web site and a server.
Examples
of both common and more obscure use cases for XMLHttpRequest
are included.
To send an HTTP request, create an XMLHttpRequest
object, open a URL, and
send the request. After the transaction completes, the object will contain useful
information such as the response body and the HTTP
status of the result.
function reqListener () {
console.log(this.responseText);
}
var oReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
oReq.addEventListener("load", reqListener);
oReq.open("GET", "http://www.example.org/example.txt");
oReq.send();
Types of requests
A request made via XMLHttpRequest
can fetch the data in one of two ways,
asynchronously or synchronously. The type of request is dictated by the optional
async
argument (the third argument) that is set on the
XMLHttpRequest.open()
method. If this argument is true
or
not specified, the XMLHttpRequest
is processed asynchronously, otherwise
the process is handled synchronously. A detailed discussion and demonstrations of these
two types of requests can be found on the synchronous
and asynchronous requests page. Do not use synchronous requests outside Web
Workers.
Note: Starting with Gecko 30.0 (Firefox 30.0 / Thunderbird 30.0 / SeaMonkey 2.27), synchronous requests on the main thread have been deprecated due to the negative effects to the user experience.
Note: The constructor function
XMLHttpRequest
isn't limited to only XML documents. It starts with
"XML" because when it was created the main format that was originally
used for Asynchronous Data Exchange was XML.
Handling responses
There are several types of response
attributes defined by the living standard specification for the
XMLHttpRequest()
constructor. These tell
the client making the XMLHttpRequest
important information about the status
of the response. Some cases where dealing with non-text response types may involve some
manipulation and analysis are outlined in the following sections.
Analyzing and manipulating the responseXML property
If you use XMLHttpRequest
to get the content of a remote XML document, the
responseXML
property will be a DOM object
containing a parsed XML document. This could prove difficult to manipulate and analyze.
There are four primary ways of analyzing this XML document:
- Using XPath to address (or point to) parts of it.
- Manually Parsing and serializing XML to strings or objects.
- Using
XMLSerializer
to serialize DOM trees to strings or to files. -
RegExp
can be used if you always know the content of the XML document beforehand. You might want to remove line breaks, if you useRegExp
to scan with regard to line breaks. However, this method is a "last resort" since if the XML code changes slightly, the method will likely fail.
Note: XMLHttpRequest
can now interpret HTML for you
using the responseXML
property. Read the
article about HTML
in XMLHttpRequest to learn how to do this.
Processing a responseText property containing an HTML document
If you use XMLHttpRequest
to get the content of a remote HTML webpage, the
responseText
property is a string
containing the raw HTML. This could prove difficult to manipulate and analyze. There are
three primary ways to analyze and parse this raw HTML string:
-
Use the
XMLHttpRequest.responseXML
property as covered in the article HTML in XMLHttpRequest. -
Inject the content into the body of a document fragment via
fragment.body.innerHTML
and traverse the DOM of the fragment. -
RegExp
can be used if you always know the content of the HTMLresponseText
beforehand. You might want to remove line breaks, if you use RegExp to scan with regard to linebreaks. However, this method is a "last resort" since if the HTML code changes slightly, the method will likely fail.
Handling binary data
Although XMLHttpRequest
is most commonly used to send and receive
textual data, it can be used to send and receive binary content. There are several well
tested methods for coercing the response of an XMLHttpRequest
into sending
binary data. These involve utilizing the overrideMimeType()
method on the XMLHttpRequest
object and is a
workable solution.
var oReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
oReq.open("GET", url);
// retrieve data unprocessed as a binary string
oReq.overrideMimeType("text/plain; charset=x-user-defined");
/* ... */
However, more modern techniques are available, since the
responseType
attribute now supports a
number of additional content types, which makes sending and receiving binary data much
easier.
For example, consider this snippet, which uses the responseType
of
"arraybuffer
" to fetch the remote content into a ArrayBuffer
object, which stores the raw binary data.
var oReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
oReq.onload = function(e) {
var arraybuffer = oReq.response; // not responseText
/* ... */
}
oReq.open("GET", url);
oReq.responseType = "arraybuffer";
oReq.send();
For more examples check out the Sending and Receiving Binary Data page
Monitoring progress
XMLHttpRequest
provides the ability to listen to various events that can
occur while the request is being processed. This includes periodic progress
notifications, error notifications, and so forth.
Support for DOM progress
event monitoring of XMLHttpRequest
transfers follows the specification for progress
events: these events implement the ProgressEvent
interface. The
actual events you can monitor to determine the state of an ongoing transfer are:
progress
-
The amount of data that has been retrieved has changed.
load
-
The transfer is complete; all data is now in the
response
var oReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
oReq.addEventListener("progress", updateProgress);
oReq.addEventListener("load", transferComplete);
oReq.addEventListener("error", transferFailed);
oReq.addEventListener("abort", transferCanceled);
oReq.open();
// ...
// progress on transfers from the server to the client (downloads)
function updateProgress (oEvent) {
if (oEvent.lengthComputable) {
var percentComplete = oEvent.loaded / oEvent.total * 100;
// ...
} else {
// Unable to compute progress information since the total size is unknown
}
}
function transferComplete(evt) {
console.log("The transfer is complete.");
}
function transferFailed(evt) {
console.log("An error occurred while transferring the file.");
}
function transferCanceled(evt) {
console.log("The transfer has been canceled by the user.");
}
Lines 3-6 add event listeners for the various events that are sent while performing a
data transfer using XMLHttpRequest
.
Note: You need to add the event listeners before
calling open()
on the request. Otherwise the progress
events
will not fire.
The progress event handler, specified by the updateProgress()
function in
this example, receives the total number of bytes to transfer as well as the number of
bytes transferred so far in the event's total
and loaded
fields. However, if the lengthComputable
field is false, the total length
is not known and will be zero.
Progress events exist for both download and upload transfers. The download events are
fired on the XMLHttpRequest
object itself, as shown in the above sample.
The upload events are fired on the XMLHttpRequest.upload
object, as shown
below:
var oReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
oReq.upload.addEventListener("progress", updateProgress);
oReq.upload.addEventListener("load", transferComplete);
oReq.upload.addEventListener("error", transferFailed);
oReq.upload.addEventListener("abort", transferCanceled);
oReq.open();
Note: Progress events are not available for the
file:
protocol.
Note: Starting in Gecko 9.0, progress events can now be relied upon to come in for every chunk of data received, including the last chunk in cases in which the last packet is received and the connection closed before the progress event is fired. In this case, the progress event is automatically fired when the load event occurs for that packet. This lets you now reliably monitor progress by only watching the "progress" event.
Note: As of Gecko 12.0, if your progress event is called with
a responseType
of "moz-blob", the value of response is a
Blob
containing the data received so far.
One can also detect all three load-ending conditions (abort
,
load
, or error
) using the loadend
event:
req.addEventListener("loadend", loadEnd);
function loadEnd(e) {
console.log("The transfer finished (although we don't know if it succeeded or not).");
}
Note there is no way to be certain, from the information received by the
loadend
event, as to which condition caused the operation to terminate;
however, you can use this to handle tasks that need to be performed in all
end-of-transfer scenarios.
Submitting forms and uploading files
Instances of XMLHttpRequest
can be used to submit forms in two ways:
- using only AJAX
- using the
FormData
API
Using the FormData
API is the simplest and fastest, but has the
disadvantage that data collected can not be stringified.
Using only AJAX is more complex, but typically more flexible and powerful.
Using nothing but XMLHttpRequest
Submitting forms without the FormData
API does not require other APIs for
most use cases. The only case where you need an additional API is if you want to
upload one or more files, where you use the FileReader
API.
A brief introduction to the submit methods
An html <form>
can be sent in four ways:
-
using the
POST
method and setting theenctype
attribute toapplication/x-www-form-urlencoded
(default); -
using the
POST
method and setting theenctype
attribute totext/plain
; -
using the
POST
method and setting theenctype
attribute tomultipart/form-data
; -
using the
GET
method (in this case theenctype
attribute will be ignored).
Now, consider the submission of a form containing only two fields, named
foo
and baz
. If you are using the POST
method the
server will receive a string similar to one of the following three examples, depending
on the encoding type you are using:
-
Method:
POST
; Encoding type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded
(default):Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded foo=bar&baz=The+first+line.%0D%0AThe+second+line.%0D%0A
- Method:
POST
; Encoding type:text/plain
:Content-Type: text/plain foo=bar baz=The first line. The second line.
-
Method:
POST
; Encoding type:multipart/form-data
:Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------314911788813839 -----------------------------314911788813839 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="foo" bar -----------------------------314911788813839 Content-Disposition: form-data; name="baz" The first line. The second line. -----------------------------314911788813839--
However, if you are using the GET
method, a string like the following will
be added to the URL:
?foo=bar&baz=The%20first%20line.%0AThe%20second%20line.
A little vanilla framework
All these effects are done automatically by the web browser whenever you submit a
<form>
. If you want to perform the same effects using JavaScript you
have to instruct the interpreter about everything. Therefore, how to send forms
in pure AJAX is too complex to be explained here in detail. For this reason,
here we place a complete (yet didactic) framework, able to use all four
ways to submit, and to upload files:
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Sending forms with pure AJAX – MDN</title>
<script type="text/javascript">
"use strict";
/*\
|*|
|*| :: XMLHttpRequest.prototype.sendAsBinary() Polyfill ::
|*|
|*| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/XMLHttpRequest#sendAsBinary()
\*/
if (!XMLHttpRequest.prototype.sendAsBinary) {
XMLHttpRequest.prototype.sendAsBinary = function(sData) {
var nBytes = sData.length, ui8Data = new Uint8Array(nBytes);
for (var nIdx = 0; nIdx < nBytes; nIdx++) {
ui8Data[nIdx] = sData.charCodeAt(nIdx) & 0xff;
}
/* send as ArrayBufferView...: */
this.send(ui8Data);
/* ...or as ArrayBuffer (legacy)...: this.send(ui8Data.buffer); */
};
}
/*\
|*|
|*| :: AJAX Form Submit Framework ::
|*|
|*| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/XMLHttpRequest/Using_XMLHttpRequest
|*|
|*| This framework is released under the GNU Public License, version 3 or later.
|*| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0-standalone.html
|*|
|*| Syntax:
|*|
|*| AJAXSubmit(HTMLFormElement);
\*/
var AJAXSubmit = (function () {
function ajaxSuccess () {
/* console.log("AJAXSubmit - Success!"); */
console.log(this.responseText);
/* you can get the serialized data through the "submittedData" custom property: */
/* console.log(JSON.stringify(this.submittedData)); */
}
function submitData (oData) {
/* the AJAX request... */
var oAjaxReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
oAjaxReq.submittedData = oData;
oAjaxReq.onload = ajaxSuccess;
if (oData.technique === 0) {
/* method is GET */
oAjaxReq.open("get", oData.receiver.replace(/(?:\?.*)?$/,
oData.segments.length > 0 ? "?" + oData.segments.join("&") : ""), true);
oAjaxReq.send(null);
} else {
/* method is POST */
oAjaxReq.open("post", oData.receiver, true);
if (oData.technique === 3) {
/* enctype is multipart/form-data */
var sBoundary = "---------------------------" + Date.now().toString(16);
oAjaxReq.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "multipart\/form-data; boundary=" + sBoundary);
oAjaxReq.sendAsBinary("--" + sBoundary + "\r\n" +
oData.segments.join("--" + sBoundary + "\r\n") + "--" + sBoundary + "--\r\n");
} else {
/* enctype is application/x-www-form-urlencoded or text/plain */
oAjaxReq.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", oData.contentType);
oAjaxReq.send(oData.segments.join(oData.technique === 2 ? "\r\n" : "&"));
}
}
}
function processStatus (oData) {
if (oData.status > 0) { return; }
/* the form is now totally serialized! do something before sending it to the server... */
/* doSomething(oData); */
/* console.log("AJAXSubmit - The form is now serialized. Submitting..."); */
submitData (oData);
}
function pushSegment (oFREvt) {
this.owner.segments[this.segmentIdx] += oFREvt.target.result + "\r\n";
this.owner.status--;
processStatus(this.owner);
}
function plainEscape (sText) {
/* How should I treat a text/plain form encoding?
What characters are not allowed? this is what I suppose...: */
/* "4\3\7 - Einstein said E=mc2" ----> "4\\3\\7\ -\ Einstein\ said\ E\=mc2" */
return sText.replace(/[\s\=\\]/g, "\\$&");
}
function SubmitRequest (oTarget) {
var nFile, sFieldType, oField, oSegmReq, oFile, bIsPost = oTarget.method.toLowerCase() === "post";
/* console.log("AJAXSubmit - Serializing form..."); */
this.contentType = bIsPost && oTarget.enctype ? oTarget.enctype : "application\/x-www-form-urlencoded";
this.technique = bIsPost ?
this.contentType === "multipart\/form-data" ? 3 : this.contentType === "text\/plain" ? 2 : 1 : 0;
this.receiver = oTarget.action;
this.status = 0;
this.segments = [];
var fFilter = this.technique === 2 ? plainEscape : escape;
for (var nItem = 0; nItem < oTarget.elements.length; nItem++) {
oField = oTarget.elements[nItem];
if (!oField.hasAttribute("name")) { continue; }
sFieldType = oField.nodeName.toUpperCase() === "INPUT" && oField.hasAttribute("type") ?
oField.getAttribute("type").toUpperCase() : "TEXT";
if (sFieldType === "FILE" && oField.files.length > 0) {
if (this.technique === 3) {
/* enctype is multipart/form-data */
for (nFile = 0; nFile < oField.files.length; nFile++) {
oFile = oField.files[nFile];
oSegmReq = new FileReader();
/* (custom properties:) */
oSegmReq.segmentIdx = this.segments.length;
oSegmReq.owner = this;
/* (end of custom properties) */
oSegmReq.onload = pushSegment;
this.segments.push("Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"" +
oField.name + "\"; filename=\"" + oFile.name +
"\"\r\nContent-Type: " + oFile.type + "\r\n\r\n");
this.status++;
oSegmReq.readAsBinaryString(oFile);
}
} else {
/* enctype is application/x-www-form-urlencoded or text/plain or
method is GET: files will not be sent! */
for (nFile = 0; nFile < oField.files.length;
this.segments.push(fFilter(oField.name) + "=" + fFilter(oField.files[nFile++].name)));
}
} else if ((sFieldType !== "RADIO" && sFieldType !== "CHECKBOX") || oField.checked) {
/* NOTE: this will submit _all_ submit buttons. Detecting the correct one is non-trivial. */
/* field type is not FILE or is FILE but is empty */
this.segments.push(
this.technique === 3 ? /* enctype is multipart/form-data */
"Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"" + oField.name + "\"\r\n\r\n" + oField.value + "\r\n"
: /* enctype is application/x-www-form-urlencoded or text/plain or method is GET */
fFilter(oField.name) + "=" + fFilter(oField.value)
);
}
}
processStatus(this);
}
return function (oFormElement) {
if (!oFormElement.action) { return; }
new SubmitRequest(oFormElement);
};
})();
</script>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Sending forms with pure AJAX</h1>
<h2>Using the GET method</h2>
<form action="register.php" method="get" onsubmit="AJAXSubmit(this); return false;">
<fieldset>
<legend>Registration example</legend>
<p>
First name: <input type="text" name="firstname" /><br />
Last name: <input type="text" name="lastname" />
</p>
<p>
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</p>
</fieldset>
</form>
<h2>Using the POST method</h2>
<h3>Enctype: application/x-www-form-urlencoded (default)</h3>
<form action="register.php" method="post" onsubmit="AJAXSubmit(this); return false;">
<fieldset>
<legend>Registration example</legend>
<p>
First name: <input type="text" name="firstname" /><br />
Last name: <input type="text" name="lastname" />
</p>
<p>
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</p>
</fieldset>
</form>
<h3>Enctype: text/plain</h3>
<form action="register.php" method="post" enctype="text/plain"
onsubmit="AJAXSubmit(this); return false;">
<fieldset>
<legend>Registration example</legend>
<p>
Your name: <input type="text" name="user" />
</p>
<p>
Your message:<br />
<textarea name="message" cols="40" rows="8"></textarea>
</p>
<p>
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</p>
</fieldset>
</form>
<h3>Enctype: multipart/form-data</h3>
<form action="register.php" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"
onsubmit="AJAXSubmit(this); return false;">
<fieldset>
<legend>Upload example</legend>
<p>
First name: <input type="text" name="firstname" /><br />
Last name: <input type="text" name="lastname" /><br />
Sex:
<input id="sex_male" type="radio" name="sex" value="male" />
<label for="sex_male">Male</label>
<input id="sex_female" type="radio" name="sex" value="female" />
<label for="sex_female">Female</label><br />
Password: <input type="password" name="secret" /><br />
What do you prefer:
<select name="image_type">
<option>Books</option>
<option>Cinema</option>
<option>TV</option>
</select>
</p>
<p>
Post your photos:
<input type="file" multiple name="photos[]">
</p>
<p>
<input id="vehicle_bike" type="checkbox" name="vehicle[]" value="Bike" />
<label for="vehicle_bike">I have a bike</label><br />
<input id="vehicle_car" type="checkbox" name="vehicle[]" value="Car" />
<label for="vehicle_car">I have a car</label>
</p>
<p>
Describe yourself:<br />
<textarea name="description" cols="50" rows="8"></textarea>
</p>
<p>
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</p>
</fieldset>
</form>
</body>
</html>
To test this, create a page named register.php (which is the
action
attribute of these sample forms), and put the following
minimalistic content:
<?php
/* register.php */
header("Content-type: text/plain");
/*
NOTE: You should never use `print_r()` in production scripts, or
otherwise output client-submitted data without sanitizing it first.
Failing to sanitize can lead to cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.
*/
echo ":: data received via GET ::\n\n";
print_r($_GET);
echo "\n\n:: Data received via POST ::\n\n";
print_r($_POST);
echo "\n\n:: Data received as \"raw\" (text/plain encoding) ::\n\n";
if (isset($HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA)) { echo $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA; }
echo "\n\n:: Files received ::\n\n";
print_r($_FILES);
The syntax to activate this script is:
AJAXSubmit(myForm);
Note: This framework uses the FileReader
API to transmit file uploads. This is a recent API and is not implemented in IE9 or
below. For this reason, the AJAX-only upload is considered an experimental
technique. If you do not need to upload binary files, this framework works
fine in most browsers.
Note: The best way to send binary content is via
ArrayBuffers
or Blobs
in conjunction
with the send()
method and possibly the
readAsArrayBuffer()
method of the
FileReader
API. But, since the aim of this script is to work with a stringifiable
raw data, we used the sendAsBinary()
method in conjunction with the readAsBinaryString()
method of the FileReader
API. As such, the above
script makes sense only when you are dealing with small files. If you do not intend to
upload binary content, consider instead using the FormData
API.
Note: The non-standard sendAsBinary
method
is considered deprecated as of Gecko 31 (Firefox 31 / Thunderbird 31 / SeaMonkey 2.28) and will be removed soon.
The standard send(Blob data)
method can be used instead.
Using FormData objects
The FormData
constructor lets you compile a
set of key/value pairs to send using XMLHttpRequest
. Its primary use is in
sending form data, but can also be used independently from a form in order to transmit
user keyed data. The transmitted data is in the same format the form's
submit()
method uses to send data, if the form's encoding type were set to
"multipart/form-data". FormData objects can be utilized in a number of ways with an
XMLHttpRequest
. For examples, and explanations of how one can utilize
FormData with XMLHttpRequests, see the Using FormData
Objects page. For didactic purposes here is a translation of the previous example transformed to use the
FormData
API. Note the brevity of the code:
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" charset="UTF-8" />
<title>Sending forms with FormData – MDN</title>
<script>
"use strict";
function ajaxSuccess () {
console.log(this.responseText);
}
function AJAXSubmit (oFormElement) {
if (!oFormElement.action) { return; }
var oReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
oReq.onload = ajaxSuccess;
if (oFormElement.method.toLowerCase() === "post") {
oReq.open("post", oFormElement.action);
oReq.send(new FormData(oFormElement));
} else {
var oField, sFieldType, nFile, sSearch = "";
for (var nItem = 0; nItem < oFormElement.elements.length; nItem++) {
oField = oFormElement.elements[nItem];
if (!oField.hasAttribute("name")) { continue; }
sFieldType = oField.nodeName.toUpperCase() === "INPUT" && oField.hasAttribute("type") ?
oField.getAttribute("type").toUpperCase() : "TEXT";
if (sFieldType === "FILE") {
for (nFile = 0; nFile < oField.files.length;
sSearch += "&" + escape(oField.name) + "=" + escape(oField.files[nFile++].name));
} else if ((sFieldType !== "RADIO" && sFieldType !== "CHECKBOX") || oField.checked) {
sSearch += "&" + escape(oField.name) + "=" + escape(oField.value);
}
}
oReq.open("get", oFormElement.action.replace(/(?:\?.*)?$/, sSearch.replace(/^&/, "?")), true);
oReq.send(null);
}
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Sending forms with FormData</h1>
<h2>Using the GET method</h2>
<form action="register.php" method="get" onsubmit="AJAXSubmit(this); return false;">
<fieldset>
<legend>Registration example</legend>
<p>
First name: <input type="text" name="firstname" /><br />
Last name: <input type="text" name="lastname" />
</p>
<p>
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</p>
</fieldset>
</form>
<h2>Using the POST method</h2>
<h3>Enctype: application/x-www-form-urlencoded (default)</h3>
<form action="register.php" method="post" onsubmit="AJAXSubmit(this); return false;">
<fieldset>
<legend>Registration example</legend>
<p>
First name: <input type="text" name="firstname" /><br />
Last name: <input type="text" name="lastname" />
</p>
<p>
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</p>
</fieldset>
</form>
<h3>Enctype: text/plain</h3>
<p>The text/plain encoding is not supported by the FormData API.</p>
<h3>Enctype: multipart/form-data</h3>
<form action="register.php" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"
onsubmit="AJAXSubmit(this); return false;">
<fieldset>
<legend>Upload example</legend>
<p>
First name: <input type="text" name="firstname" /><br />
Last name: <input type="text" name="lastname" /><br />
Sex:
<input id="sex_male" type="radio" name="sex" value="male" />
<label for="sex_male">Male</label>
<input id="sex_female" type="radio" name="sex" value="female" />
<label for="sex_female">Female</label><br />
Password: <input type="password" name="secret" /><br />
What do you prefer:
<select name="image_type">
<option>Books</option>
<option>Cinema</option>
<option>TV</option>
</select>
</p>
<p>
Post your photos:
<input type="file" multiple name="photos[]">
</p>
<p>
<input id="vehicle_bike" type="checkbox" name="vehicle[]" value="Bike" />
<label for="vehicle_bike">I have a bike</label><br />
<input id="vehicle_car" type="checkbox" name="vehicle[]" value="Car" />
<label for="vehicle_car">I have a car</label>
</p>
<p>
Describe yourself:<br />
<textarea name="description" cols="50" rows="8"></textarea>
</p>
<p>
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</p>
</fieldset>
</form>
</body>
</html>
Note: As we said, FormData
objects are not stringifiableobjects. If you want to stringify a submitted data, use the previous pure-AJAX example. Note
also that, although in this example there are some file
<input>
fields, when you submit a form through the
FormData
API you do not need to use the FileReader
API
also: files are automatically loaded and uploaded.
Get last modified date
function getHeaderTime () {
console.log(this.getResponseHeader("Last-Modified")); /* A valid GMTString date or null */
}
var oReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
oReq.open("HEAD" /* use HEAD if you only need the headers! */, "yourpage.html");
oReq.onload = getHeaderTime;
oReq.send();
Do something when last modified date changes
Let's create two functions:
function getHeaderTime () {
var nLastVisit = parseFloat(window.localStorage.getItem('lm_' + this.filepath));
var nLastModified = Date.parse(this.getResponseHeader("Last-Modified"));
if (isNaN(nLastVisit) || nLastModified > nLastVisit) {
window.localStorage.setItem('lm_' + this.filepath, Date.now());
isFinite(nLastVisit) && this.callback(nLastModified, nLastVisit);
}
}
function ifHasChanged(sURL, fCallback) {
var oReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
oReq.open("HEAD" /* use HEAD - we only need the headers! */, sURL);
oReq.callback = fCallback;
oReq.filepath = sURL;
oReq.onload = getHeaderTime;
oReq.send();
}
And to test:
/* Let's test the file "yourpage.html"... */
ifHasChanged("yourpage.html", function (nModified, nVisit) {
console.log("The page '" + this.filepath + "' has been changed on " + (new Date(nModified)).toLocaleString() + "!");
});
If you want to know if the current page has changed,
please read the article about document.lastModified
.
Cross-site XMLHttpRequest
Modern browsers support cross-site requests by implementing the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) standard. As
long as the server is configured to allow requests from your web application's origin,
XMLHttpRequest
will work. Otherwise, an INVALID_ACCESS_ERR
exception is thrown.
Bypassing the cache
A cross-browser compatible approach to bypassing the cache is appending a timestamp to the URL, being sure to include a "?" or "&" as appropriate. For example:
http://foo.com/bar.html -> http://foo.com/bar.html?12345 http://foo.com/bar.html?foobar=baz -> http://foo.com/bar.html?foobar=baz&12345
As the local cache is indexed by URL, this causes every request to be unique, thereby bypassing the cache.
You can automatically adjust URLs using the following code:
var oReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
oReq.open("GET", url + ((/\?/).test(url) ? "&" : "?") + (new Date()).getTime());
oReq.send(null);
Security
The recommended way to enable cross-site scripting is to use the
Access-Control-Allow-Origin
HTTP header in the response to the
XMLHttpRequest.
XMLHttpRequests being stopped
If you conclude with an XMLHttpRequest receiving status=0
and
statusText=null
, this means the request was not allowed to be performed. It
was
UNSENT
.
A likely cause for this is when the XMLHttpRequest
origin (at the creation of the XMLHttpRequest) has changed when the XMLHttpRequest
is subsequently open()
. This case can happen, for example, when one has an
XMLHttpRequest that gets fired on an onunload event for a window, the expected
XMLHttpRequest is created when the window to be closed is still there, and finally
sending the request (in other words, open()
) when this window has lost its
focus and another window gains focus. The most effective way to avoid this problem is to
set a listener on the new window's activate
event which is set once the
terminated window has its unload
event triggered.
Workers
Setting overrideMimeType
does not work from a Worker
. See
bug 678057 for more details. Other browsers may handle this differently.
Specifications
Specification |
---|
XMLHttpRequest Standard # interface-xmlhttprequest |
Browser compatibility
BCD tables only load in the browser