Head Rush Ajax

360

Chapter 6

Hey, I bet it’s just as easy to send an XML

request as it is to receive an XML response.

It turns out that you’ve got to do a good bit of

work to send XML... in fact, quite a bit more

work than it took to receive XML from the

server. Most of the time, the effort you’ll have

to put into sending XML just isn’t worth it.

First, you’ll need to send the XML in a POST

request...

Well, there’s a little more to it...

Sure, that makes sense. Because XML can

get pretty long, and there’s that maximum

URL length on GET requests, right?

It doesn’t take a lot of data before an XML

document gets pretty long. You’ll denitely

need to use a POST request. Additionally,

you’ll need to let the server know that you’re

sending it XML, not name/value pairs.

That’s right.

Even the short XML

response from the

Boards server took up

almost 200 characters!

That’s easy, too. I bet we can use a different

Content-Type request header, right?

You can use the setRequestHeader()

method on your request object to tell the

server that you’re sending it XML, like this:

You’ve really got this stuff down!

request.setRequestHeader(“Content-Type”, “text/xml”);

This tells the server that the content type of the

incoming message is XML, in text format.

sending xml requests