jQuery respondTo

Plugin to dynamically handle different content types for an AJAX response.

Usage

Should be nearly identical in usage to the built-in $.ajax method except automatically post-processing response data according to incoming mime-type, and the parameters passed to the success callback. Those are now:
( data, contentType, statusCode )

Where data is the same as it always has been, contentType is a string representation of the content type, and statusCode is the actual numerical HTTP status code returned from the server.

You can also use custom content-type callbacks such as html, json, and script. The callback for the respective content-type will be called immediately after the success callbacks.

The way the content type is determined is by the jQuery.respondToSettings.mimeTypes value. By default this is set to:

{
  'text':    ['text/plain'],
  'json':    ['application/json'],
  'html':    ['text/html', 'application/xhtml+xml'],
  'xml':     ['application/xml', 'text/xml', 'application/x-xml'],
  'script':  ['text/javascript', 'application/javascript', 'application/x-javascript', 
              'text/ecmascript', 'application/ecmascript']
}

If the content-type header is not found in one of the listed MIME types, then a content-type of "other" is returned.

While not API identical to the built-in $.ajax function, $.respondTo should be able to be used as a drop-in replacement for it in most cases. Places where there could be a potential problem is plugins or existing code that depend on the dataType setting, or where global ajaxSettings have been defined and are being used.

To replace the built-in ajax function with the respond to function add this line:

jQuery.ajax = jQuery.respondTo;

Examples

Using the content-type specific callback functions to have different success behavior based on content-type:

$.respondTo({
  url: '/people/37',
  html: function(html, status){
    // handle HTML response
  },
  json: function(json, status){
    // handle JSON response
  }
});

Using the typical success callback but with the new arguments:

$.respondTo({
  url: '/people/37',
  success: function(data, contentType, status){
    // example values:
    //   data: {id: 20, title: "Another Blog Post"}
    //   contentType: "json"
    //   status: 201
  }
});

Replacing $.ajax with $.respondTo and using the alternate respondTo option syntax:

$.ajax = $.respondTo;
$.ajax({
  url: "/people/37",
  respondTo: {
    html: function(html, status){
      // handle HTML response
    },
    json: function(html, status){
      // handle JSON response
    }
  }
});

Copyright (c) 2009 Brian Landau & Matt Henry, released under the MIT license