Question

empty responseText

Asked by: WernerVonBraun

Howdy folks. This one is driving me demented. I have no idea what is going on.

See the code below. When the ready state = 4, the status = 0, the statusText = "OK" and the responseText is blank.

I've googled until my fingers are numb, but I'm getting no clues.

The "gogetit" function is invoked from a button click but I don't think that really matters.

What's goin' on? 

var xmlhttp;
function gogetit()
{
xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest(); //never mind IE, I'll worry about that later. This is FireFox 3.5.4
xmlhttp.open('GET', 'http://www.carobit.com', true);
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = checkret;
 
xmlhttp.send(null);
}
function checkret()
{
if (xmlhttp.readyState == null)
  {
   return;
  }
 
if (xmlhttp.readyState != 4)
  {
   return;
  }
 
alert(xmlhttp.status);
alert(xmlhttp.statusText);
alert(xmlhttp.responseText);
 
}

                                  
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Asked On
2009-10-29 at 15:39:23ID24856539
Tags

httprequest

Topic

Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX)

Participating Experts
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Answers

 

by: kadabaPosted on 2009-10-29 at 20:26:55ID: 25700023

check it the other way round

function checkret()
{
  if (xmlhttp.readyState == 4)
  {
   alert(xmlhttp.status);
   alert(xmlhttp.statusText);
   alert(xmlhttp.responseText);
  }
}

                                              
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by: kadabaPosted on 2009-10-29 at 20:36:08ID: 25700047

and also responseText  will contain some value only if you return something in the response stream..

 

by: WernerVonBraunPosted on 2009-10-30 at 00:30:58ID: 25700726

> and also responseText  will contain some value only if you return something in the response stream..

I'm just pointing it at a random (well, not THAT random - MY) site. If you type www.carobit.com in your browser's address bar, you see a web page being displayed. Are you saying that responseText doesn't necessarily contain what you would get if you right-clicked and checked the source of that page?

If so, is there another way of getting THAT information?

 

by: WernerVonBraunPosted on 2009-10-30 at 00:48:21ID: 25700788

Oh, and no. Changing the logic didn't make any difference. How could it have? (Having said that, I once had a rather intractable problem in VB6 with a third party component that returned a boolean value that was neither "true" nor "false". I'm not kidding but it's outside the scope of this question).

 

by: WernerVonBraunPosted on 2009-10-30 at 01:48:15ID: 25701036

okaaaaaayyyyyyy.....

The plot thickens. I just created a wee little VB6 proggie. And here's the code in that:

Dim oXHTTP As XMLHTTP60

Set oXHTTP = New XMLHTTP60
oXHTTP.open "get", "http://www.carobit.com", False
oXHTTP.send

MsgBox oXHTTP.responseText

Note how I'm doing the request synchronously, but it doesn't make any difference whether I do it synchronously or not. If I do it asynchronously I just need to check the readyState and all that palaver.

Being that as it may be, the code is doing exactly the same thing, for exactly the same site ...

... and it works fine.

Riddle me that.



Here's the rub though: I am starting to suspect that this may be a SECURITY measure, stopping one web page from doing client side HTTP requests to a different server. If that's the case, I may as well abandon my perfect plan.

Drat and double drat. Drat I tells ya. DRAT.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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