How to populate a paged Dojo.Grid with data from an ASP.Net web service?

Question

I'm trying to populate a Dojo grid with data from an ASP.Net web service. There is going to be a lot of rows, so I want to implement paging on the server side, so the web service will accept parameters "start" and "count". I've gotten pretty close, by using QueryReadStore and overriding the "fetch" function to add additional parameters (the web service requires more than just start and count).

The immediate problem I've encountered is that the web service is returning the data as XML. I believe this is because the request does not contain a Content-Type header indicating a preference for json (which the grid wants). I am using an Http-Post rather than the default Get. Is a ResponseFormat attribute supposed to override this? It doesn't work for me.

So, how do I get the data as json? Or alternately, am I barking up the wrong tree? It would seem like a pretty common thing to glue together a grid and a web service. Does Dojo have any built-in functionality for this that I am just not aware of?

Thanks

Answer 1

You should be able to simply set the handleAs parameter on your call to dojo.xhrPost(..) to "xml", this will bind the XML to javascript objects to make your life easier while handling the data:

dojo.xhrPost({
    url: "http://whatever.com/someendpoint",
    handleAs: "xml",
    load: function(response, ioArgs){
        /*
         * Do something with response, it's a JS object that reflects the XML.
         */
    }
});

Alternatively, you could chose to send different HTTP Headers in your AJAX call by using the headers property of the argument object for dojo.xhrPost(..):

dojo.xhrPost({
    url: "http://whatever.com/someendpoint",
    handleAs: "json",
    headers: {
        "Accept" : "text/javascript, text/json, application/json, application/javascript"
    },
    load: function(response, ioArgs){
        /*
         * Do something with response, it's a JS object that reflects the JSON.
         */
    }
});