Best practices for passing data...

[ajlisowski]

Hey everybody, Ive been messing around with ajax for a year or so now. However, one thing I feel like I am always sort of "hacking" together is the way I pass data back to javascript.

 

A lot of times I will simply pass back a string with some custom deliminator (ex: ** or ||) however this does not seem to be the most effecient or "correct" way of doing things. Ive reused a ton of code, so a lot of my projects all run off the same basic handlers which explode the deliminator, check the first result for a success or error code and then handle the rest of the array as data.

 

Is this wrong? Should I switch to using JSON or XML? Or is what I am doing acceptable?

[andrewgauger]

With your topic title being "best practice" I would advise XML.  However, JSON is generally easier to parse.

 

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.json-decode.php

 

Makes it pretty easy to use.

[Mchl]

Why XML would be 'best practice'? Just because it's an 'X' in 'Ajax' ?

 

The argment between proponents of XML and JSON is heated, but I can't really see actual arguments on favor of either. I like JSON more, but that might be because I work with ExtJS mostly, which has some splendid tools for JSON.

[andrewgauger]

XML was first, and that is why I quote as best practice.  I do not support it as the best product.

[Mchl]

Argument from age? Doesn't seem valid for me

 

Anyway, I think the onswer to OP's question is to use some standarised fromat, like XML or JSON or even php serialised data. Which  exactly is the best for given application, depends on specific rquirements for this applicaiton.

[ajlisowski]

For the sake of knowledge I was looking into how to pass an xml object from JS to PHP.

 

I know that you can set your header to txt/xml in the httprequest object before sending it.

 

I monitored my progress in firebug and can see that the POST successfully contains the xml object, but how do I actually access that in the php file?

 

$_REQUEST is empty, which makes sense since I didnt send it as a post param.