Using AJAX and return a picture - html

I have a problem receiving and opening a picture via AJAX.
If I call the following page:
http://127.0.0.1:8889/ex?sql=SELECT+Image+FROM+Persons+WHERE+Number+Like+%27%2501%27
a picture is displayed from a blob field in IE8.
Now I would like to open this into a div after someone pressed a key (using AJAX)?
Trying to use xhr.responseText does not work (I get an error. Using it on a text response works). So it seems that my problem is to grab the result from the ajax request.
How can I do this?
Some code and the error message:
var picReturn = xhr.responseText;
=> Could not continue due to the following error: c00ce514

You have three options:
Place the resultant data in an iframe. Not very practical.
Take the result and place it in am image source as a data:uri. Not supported in older browsers and limited to 32/64Kb depending on the browser.
Skip the AJAX and write a web service and use that as your url. This is the best option.
You don't say what language you're using server-side but you essentially want to open a web response, set the header to "image/jpeg" and return your stream.

Related

HTML5 History API: JSON displayed when going "back" to another page, and then "forward" again

I have a page where there are several search / filter button which, when clicked, refresh the contents of a list below through AJAX.
In the process, I'm modifying history (through pushstate) so that the new filtered page is bookmarkable, and so the back button works. I'm also listening for the popstate event, to react to Back.
My code looks more or less like this:
window.addEventListener("popstate", function(ev) {
if (!window.history_ready) { return; } // Avoid the one time it runs on load
refreshFilter(window.location.href, true);
});
refreshFilter: function(newURL, backButtonPressed){
$.ajax({ url: newURL}).done( blah );
if (!backButtonPressed) {
window.history_ready = true;
history.pushState(null, null, newURL);
}
}
This works wonderfully, except for one weird case...
User is in page "A"
They click a link to go to this page that plays with history (let's call it "B")
They run a couple of filters, then press Back a few times, so they're back at the initial state of "B"
They click Back once again, which sends them back to "A"
At this time, if they press Forward, instead of making a request to the server again for Page "B", the browser simply displays a bunch of JSON code as the page contents (this JSOn is the response of one of my AJAX requests to filter stuff)
At least in latest Chrome
Why is this happening and how can I avoid it?
Chrome caches the pages you visit and when you go back or forward it uses the cache to display the page quickly. If the URLs you are using to retrieve JSON from the server by AJAX is the same one Chrome would hit, then it's possible Chrome is picking that page from the cache, which instead of being the nice HTML it's just a JSON dump.
There is a cache option for $.ajax:
$.ajax({ cache: false, url: newURL})
See http://api.jquery.com/jquery.ajax/
#pupeno is right, but to give a more solution oriented answer, you need to differentiate the JSON from HTML in the routes your server has.
I know two ways of doing this:
1) If you call /users you get HTML, if you call /users.json you get JSON.
2) If you call /users you get HTML, if you call /api/users you get JSON.
I like 1 a lot better, but it depends on the web framework if whichever is used by default or wether you configure that yourself.
1 is used in Ruby on Rails, 2 is used in other frameworks too.

Google Chrome show ajax response

I am using Google Chrome Developer Tools to try to see the response of some AJAX url's.
The problem is that when I click on the NETWORK TAB, then on the link, then on RESPONSE, I see this text : "THIS REQUEST HAS NO RESPONSE DATA AVAILABLE".
I have been using FIREBUG and I am 100% sure there is a response from that page.
Can somebody help with this ?
Thank you !
You can try manually checking if there's a response or not
So, generally when dealing with ajax, in most cases we use the POST, You can create a 'same structured' page to handle same input/response but using Get method and print the output data as normal.
This way you can see if there's any response/errors in your script very easily

detect iframe load error

I am loading a user-selected page into an iframe using the src property. If the load fails, I would like to report the problem in terms that will make sense to the user. iframe does not, in general, support onerror according to http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/dom_obj_frame.asp.
The page may come from the user's domain, not mine, so I cannot view the content of the iframe.
I can set a timeout and cancel it from my onload handler if the load is successful, but it would need to be a long timeout to avoid false error reports, and meanwhile Safari on my iPhone has displayed an alert that may confuse the user. Even this does not work for the Kindle Fire browser - it delivers a load event to my handler regardless of whether the load was successful.
Is there any event I can use to detect failure? Is there any way to suppress the default Safari behavior? Any way I can tell whether the load attempt has failed? (If I could do that, I could use a shorter timeout and poll until the load attempt is resolved).
I can require the use of up to date browsers, but would like a solution that is portable among as many smartphones and tablets as possible.
I have tested the AJAX Get idea, and it unfortunately does not work. A cross-domain AJAX Get to an arbitrary URI results in an exception, regardless of whether the target exists and can be loaded into the iframe or not.
You could set your iframe and/or ajax request to always call a page you control (ie: loader.php), sending loader.php the user's requested page via get. From loader.php, use curl or even just file_get_contents to fetch the external page. If the request fails to come back to loader.php, you can check the error there, and return whatever you want your iframe to display.
While my example references the use of php, curl is supported in a variety of scripting languages. It is likely more complicated than other solutions you might have, but would give you access to the response headers as well for troubleshooting why a page load failed.
As you've hinted, you'll face same-origin-policy type restrictions when you try to query anything inside the iframe if it's on a separate domain.
You could make an AJAX GET request to the iframe's URL before you pass it into the src of the frame. If you don't get an HTTP 200 response back from the AJAX call, then the site won't be able to load inside the frame either.
This will add overhead to the whole process, and is only useful if you're checking whether the iframe's document is a real URL that works. It won't help if you need to know when the iframe document has fully loaded.
If you need to know when the iframe has loaded, and it's on an external domain, then I believe you have no other option but to ask for some code to be added to those external sites to notify the parent page that they've loaded successfully.
Or, if it makes sense to do so, ask the end user to click a link to flag up that the content isn't loading correctly.
Late to the party, but I've managed to crack it:
At first, I thought to do an AJAX call like everyone else, except that it didn't work for me initially, as I had used jQuery. It works perfectly if you do a XMLHttpRequest:
var url = http://url_to_test.com/
var xhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
if (this.readyState == 4 && this.status != 200) {
console.log("iframe failed to load");
}
};
xhttp.open("GET", url, true);
xhttp.send();
Edit:
So this method works ok, except that it has a lot of false negatives (picks up a lot of stuff that would display in an iframe) due to cross-origin malarky. The way that I got around this was to do a CURL/Web request on a server, and then check the response headers for a) if the website exists, and b) if the headers had set x-frame-options.
This isn't a problem if you run your own webserver, as you can make your own api call for it.
My implementation in node.js:
app.get('/iframetest',function(req,res){ //Call using /iframetest?url=url - needs to be stripped of http:// or https://
var url = req.query.url;
var request = require('https').request({host: url}, function(response){ //This does an https request - require('http') if you want to do a http request
var headers = response.headers;
if (typeof headers["x-frame-options"] != 'undefined') {
res.send(false); //Headers don't allow iframe
} else {
res.send(true); //Headers don't disallow iframe
}
});
request.on('error',function(e){
res.send(false); //website unavailable
});
request.end();
});

HTTP POST call embedded in a static html page

I want to embed an HTTP call which returns a png image into an html page.
I will run the page on github's gh-pages if that makes a difference.
The url is: http://public.opencpu.org/R/user/SChamberlain/ropensci_dash/apistatus10/png
Note that sometimes the url doesn't return the png as the service is sometimes down.
I want to call that url using POST method, and simply return the png into the page. Ideally the http call would be run on page recycle as well.
Do I use an iframe, form, javascript?
Thanks! Scott
[I might as well answer properly]
When a server is feeding you image data and you want to load it, you might as well treat it like an image and use an img tag. The problem with this approach in your particular case is that you said that the server can sometimes be down and this would mean that if you simply appended the image without checking for a broken link first you will get that ugly broken image space.
However, the simplicity of using an image is still feasible. By using a little javascript with a load event handler you can append the image if and only if it loads successfully. If you get any kind of error code from the request the load event will never fire and you won't append a broken image.
Here's the concept in vanilla-js:
img = document.createElement("img");
img.onload = function(e){document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(img);};
img.src = "http://public.opencpu.org/R/user/SChamberlain/ropensci_dash/apistatus10/png";
You can also see it in action here: http://jsfiddle.net/BwJeC/
You could use XHR to load the binary data from the external, dynamic page and set the content of the image.
This question, is very much similar
Or this
I really don't understand why you want to POST.
Anyway if you want to query a picture with a POST data you could, may have to do a Js XHR call and return the the image as base64 and then do something like:
<img src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUA
AAAFCAYAAACNbyblAAAAHElEQVQI12P4//8/w38GIAXDIBKE0DHxgljNBAAO
9TXL0Y4OHwAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==" />
The best would still be to to a simple get call:
<img src="/dynamicallyGeneratedPicture" />
with a route or script that return a document of type image.

Chrome extension, replace HTML in response code before browser displays it

i wonder if there is some way to do something like that:
If im on a specific site i want that some of javascript files to be loaded directly from my computer (f.e. file:///c:/test.js), not from the server.
For that i was thinking if there is a possibility to make an extension which could change HTML code in a response which browser gets right before displaying it. So whole process should look like that:
request is made
browser gets response from server
#response is changed# - this is the part when extension comes in
browser parse changed response and display page with that new response.
It doesnt even have to be a Chrome extension anyway. It should just do the job described above. It can block original file and serve another one (DNS/proxy?) or filter whole HTTP traffic in my computer and replace specific code to another one of matched response.
You can use the WebRequest API to achieve that. For example, you can add a onBeforeRequest listener and redirect some requests:
chrome.webRequest.onBeforeRequest.addListener(function(details)
{
var responseData = "<div>Some text</div>"
return {redirectUrl: "data:text/html," + encodeURIComponent(responseData)};
}, {urls: ["https://www.google.com/"]}, ["blocking"]);
This will display a <div> element with the text "some text" instead of the Google homepage. Note that you can only redirect to URLs that the web server itself is allowed to redirect to. This means that redirecting to file:/// URLs is not possible, and you can only redirect to files inside your extension if these are web accessible. data: and http: URLs work fine however.
In Windows you can use the Proxomitron (proxomitron.info) which is a local proxy that can intercept any page or file being loading into your browser and change it using regular expressions (no DOM parsing) however you want, before it is rendered by the browser.