Using GET Instead of POST

As with submitting any form data, you have the option of submitting your data in the form of GET requests, and you will save a few lines of code if you do so. However, there is a downside: some browsers may cache GET requests, whereas POST requests will never be cached. You don’t want to cache requests, because the browser will just redisplay what it got last time instead of going to the server for fresh input. The solution to this is to use a workaround that adds a random parameter to each request, ensuring that each URL requested is unique.

Example 17-4 shows how you would achieve the same result as with Example 17-2, but using an Ajax GET request instead of POST.

Example 17-4. urlget.html
<html><head><title>Ajax GET Example</title>
</head><body><center />
<h1>Loading a web page into a DIV</h1>
<div id='info'>This sentence will be replaced</div>
<script>

nocache = "&nocache=" + Math.random() * 1000000
request = new ajaxRequest()
request.open("GET", "urlget.php?url=oreilly.com" + nocache, true)

request.onreadystatechange = function()
{
    if (this.readyState == 4)
    {
          if (this.status == 200)
          {
               if (this.responseText != null)
               {
                     document.getElementById('info').innerHTML = this.responseText
               }
               else alert("Ajax error: No data received")
          }
          else alert( "Ajax error: " + this.statusText)
    }
}

request.send(null) function ajaxRequest() { try { var request = new XMLHttpRequest() } catch(e1) { try { request = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP") } catch(e2) { try { request ...

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