Using jQuery ajax with node.js to send POST request

Question

I have the following in myserver/index.js (which I run with node):

server.configure(function() {
  server.use(express.methodOverride());
  server.use(express.bodyParser());
  server.use(server.router);
  server.use(express.static(__dirname + '/public'));
  server.use(express.errorHandler({ dumpExceptions: true, showStack: true }));
});

server.post('/signup/submit', function(req, res) {
  console.log(req);
  res.send(req.body);
});

server.listen(process.env.PORT || 12345, function() {
  console.log('Server listening');
});

I have the following in the <script> section of my myserver/public/signup/index.html file

function submit() {
  $.ajax({
    url: "submit",
    type: "POST",
    contentType: "application/xml",
    data: '<?xml version="1.0"?><user>John Smith</user>',
    dataType: "xml",
    success: function(data, textStatus, jqXHR) { alert(data); },
    error: function(jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown) { alert(errorThrown); }
});

When submit() gets called, an alert pops up saying "Error: Invalid XML: {}". From the console dump of req, I see that body is indeed empty, but further examination shows that it has received all the other data. Here is the header:

headers: 
{ host: 'localhost:12345',
  connection: 'keep-alive',
  'content-length': '44',
  origin: 'http://localhost:12345',
  'x-requested-with': 'XMLHttpRequest',
  'user-agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/536.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20.0.1132.57 Safari/536.11',
  'content-type': 'application/xml',
  accept: 'application/xml, text/xml, */*; q=0.01',
  referer: 'http://localhost:12345/signup/',
  'accept-encoding': 'gzip,deflate,sdch',
  'accept-language': 'en-US,en;q=0.8',
  'accept-charset': 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3' }

I'm new to Ajax, jQuery, and Node.js, so I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I feel like it's something little I'm missing.

Thanks.

wanovak · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-25 16:25:19Z

1

Try this:

$.ajax({
    url: "submit",
    type: "POST",
    contentType: "application/xml",
    data: "<user>John Smith</user>", // remove <?xml ...
    dataType: "xml",
    success: function(data, textStatus, jqXHR) { alert(data); },
    error: function(jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown) { alert(errorThrown); }
});

edited Jul 25, 2012 at 16:25

answered Jul 24, 2012 at 22:54

wanovak

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8 Comments

Nick Over a year ago

But I set contentType: "application/xml" to indicate that the request data type is XML. Did I miss something?

wanovak Over a year ago

Yes. The header that you set in the server-side script receiving the request denotes the return type. So, for example, if you request a server side script to serve up an image, you set the contentType to image/jpeg, for example. Does that help?

Nick Over a year ago

Based on your response, I don't see the difference between dataType and contentType. You have said they are both the return type of the data received from the server.

wanovak Over a year ago

Oh, I apologize. I thought you meant the header contentType. I'll update my answer.

Nick Over a year ago

Hmm...the data still doesn't seem to be showing up on the server side. It would appear in req.body, right? The server can respond with XML though.

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