AJAX

When I was new to working with AJAX functions—especially in the realm of form submission—one hurdle I often encountered was how to handle processing errors in my back-end script and give meaningful feedback to my users. I didn’t understand how to designate a response as an error instead of successful processing. Early on, I sometimes employed a dirty hack of prepending any error with the string ERROR: and then adding in some quick checking to see if that substring existed in my response text. While that may get the job done, it’s not good form. It causes convoluted code usage, thumbs its nose at existing error handling functionality and makes future maintenance a headache. But there is a better way by simply utilizing your processing language’s inherent header and error handling functionality. … Continue reading →