Photo by Bored-Now

I’ve been writing a lot of Ajax code to request some information from a server, and then update an element on the page with the returned HTML. The basic XMLHttpRequest code to do this is pretty simple, but I’ve specialized the code to do a couple of common things. First, it always replaces the HTML of the element with the ID given in $replacename, and it takes in a Javascript variable name so you can dynamically alter the URL parameters that are passed in. The second part is really useful when you want a client-side event to trigger the fetch, you can write <select onchange="yourajaxfunction(this.value);"> in a menu, and then define the values in each menu item. Here’s the PHP code for the function body:

function add_ajax_fetch_script($fetchurl, $parametersjsvar, $replacename)
{
?>
    var xhr;
    try
    {
        xhr = new ActiveXObject(‘Msxml2.XMLHTTP’);
    }
    catch (e)
    {
        try
        {
            xhr = new ActiveXObject(‘Microsoft.XMLHTTP’);
        }
        catch (e2)
        {
            try
            {
                xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
            }
            catch (e3)
            {
                xhr = false;
            }
        }
    }

<?php
}

To use this code, you’d write out the signature and name of your Javascript function, call add_ajax_fetch_script() and then terminate the JS function with a closing curly brace. Eg:

function yourajaxfunction(urlsuffix)
{
<?php
add_ajax_fetch_script("http://someurl.com&quot;, "urlsuffix", "someelementid");
?>
}