Saturday, May 30, 2009

2 Ajax plugins for jQuery +1.3

Introduction

I never actually posted about 2 tiny plugins I made, once jQuery 1.3 was nearing.

Both are somehow related, they are related to Ajax (jQuery.ajax) and they provide sort of a manager to allow multiple implementations of the same feature.

Needless to say, both plugins only work under jQuery 1.3 or higher. The packages(zips) include jQuery 1.2.7pre because that's the version I used to test them when I made them. You obviously don't need to use that version.


XHR

Since jQuery 1.3. The default XHR "factory" function can be overriden by passing an 'xhr' setting to jQuery.ajax with a new function

This tiny plugin provides a simple registry for different xhr implementations to co-exist.

To provide a new implementation, you need to do something like this:

jQuery.xhr.register( 'my_xhr', function( settings ){
  return new MyXhrImplementation( settings );
});

The argument settings is the object passed to jQuery.ajax.

To use it, you do:

jQuery.ajax({
    url:'...',
    transport:'my_xhr',
    // ...
});

The built-in implementation is used by default (unless it's overriden with jQuery.ajaxSetup) and it's called 'xhr'.

Links & Downloads

AjaxFilter

This plugin lets you store multiple functions to sanitize ajax responses.

If you want to provide a new implementation, you need to do something like this:

jQuery.ajaxFilter.register('js_in_href','html',
 function( data ){
  return data.replace(/href="javascript:[^"]+"/g, '');
});

or

jQuery.ajaxFilter.register('eval','script html json',
 function( data ){
   return data.replace(/eval\(.+?\);?/g, '');
});

Arguments for jQuery.ajaxFilter.register() are:

  1. Name for the filter, used as 'filter' when calling jQuery.ajax.
  2. One or more dataTypes to handle. Can be any combination of ajax, html, json and xml separated by spaces.
  3. The filter function. Will receive 2 arguments: the data and the type. The 'this' will reference the settings object.

To use it, you do:

jQuery.ajax({
    url:'foo.html',
    filter:'js_in_href',
    // ...
});

The filter can also parse the response.
That means it can (for example) provide an alternative way of eval'ing json. This is specially useful for Adobe AIR apps. If the filter returns something else than a string, it's assumed to be the final response.

Links & Downloads

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What XHR replacements are already existing? I only have seen flXHR so far.

Is there any implementation using IFRAMEs or JS tags?

Ariel Flesler said...

I only know just flXHR as well.