AJAX: problem with redirect

Question

Hi,

This is the first time ever I'm using AJAX, and I want to do the following on an otherwise static page www.xyz.org/some_site.html:

• Send a GET request to another url "www.xyz.org/testscript"
• if response has either status code != 200 or content != 'ok': do nothing
• else: include sth on the website (i.e. set style="display:block" on an element that previously had "display:none")

I've implemented that successfully using basic AJAX. But:

There is an Apache redirect installed pointing from www.xyz.org/testscript to subdomain.xyz.org/testscript, the URL where the actual testscript lives (as AJAX doesn't support cross-domain calls even to subdomains afaik).

When I call www.xyz.org/testscript I get a 302 status code, and the content says "The document has moved here: subdomain.xyz.org/testscript".

How can I grab the 'final' return value?

I guess/hope any AJAX expert can give me a one-liner to solve that ...

Answer 1

The answer is, according to the comments above:

It's not possible to achieve what I want to do, as AJAX can't be tricked into following a redirect.

EDIT: I tried to solve it by adding another javascript file at subdomain.xyz.org/another.js and throwing all AJAX code from my static html site into it.

Then, on the static html site, I included this script with an ordinary

<script src="subdomain.xyz.org/another.js">

tag. But that wouldn't work either ... cheated myself: Including the javascript on my static page results in the original problem again (cross-domain calls forbidden).

Answer 2

AJAX (or XMLHttpRequest to be acurate) won't be tricked by a redirect. To be able to get content from another domain you need to use a proxy on the server. The following is a simple PHP proxy:

if(strpos($_GET['q'], "http://") === 0){
  echo file_get_contents($_GET['q']);
}

use it like this:

xhr.open(GET, "www.xyz.org/proxy.php?q=subdomain.xyz.org/testscript", true);