dojo newbie read json response from web service - json

Question

i have a webservice that is returning this response :
<string xmlns="http://tempuri.org/">{ "Head":[ { "ID":"1","Name":"David"} ]}</string>
when i try to get the response back, i keep getting the error :
"missing ; before statement"
i am just starting to get into this so am probably doing something very wrong.
why is the response not working for me?
my dojo code looks like this
var targetNode = document.getElementById("foo");
var def = dojo.io.script.get({
url: "http://localhost/WebData/PublicData.asmx/HelloWorld",
timeout: 30000,
handleAs: "json",
preventCache: true,
handle: function(error, ioargs) {
var message = "";
switch (ioargs.xhr.status) {
case 200:
message = "Good request.";
break;
case 404:
message = "The requested page was not found";
break;
case 500:
message = "The server reported an error.";
break;
case 407:
message = "You need to authenticate with a proxy.";
break;
default:
message = "Unknown error.";
}
targetNode.innerHTML = message;
}
});
thanks!
david

Answer 1

Your server's response mixes XML-like data (<string xmlns="http://tempuri.org/">)with JSON.
For dojo to handle the response using handleAs: 'json' you will need your server to return pure JSON data only, i.e just
{ "Head":[ { "ID":"1","Name":"David"} ]}
Failing that you would need to handle the response as text, strip out the tags and then parse just the JSON content. As a general tip "missing ; before statement" usually means mal-formed JSON.
EDIT
I just noticed the first argument to your handle function is "error". The first argument to the handle function contains the server's response (In this case a javascript object based on the JSON received.).