Javascript – jQuery Ajax requests are getting cancelled without being sent

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I am trying to hook up a script to Microsoft's World-Wide Telescope app. The latter listens on port 5050 for commands. It is running on the same machine as the browser (Chrome right now, but as far as I can tell the behavior is the same with Firefox 7 and IE 9).

I am sending a "Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *" header with the original html file to try to eliminate XSS restrictions as my problem.

My code to access WWT is as follows:

$.ajax({
    type: 'POST',
    url: url,
    data: data,
    crossDomain: true,
    success: success,
    dataType: dataType
});

url in this case is "http://127.0.0.1:5050/layerApi.aspx?cmd=new&…" (obviously … is shorthand here for some additional parameters).

Looking at the network diagnostics in Chrome, I can see this:

Request URL:http://127.0.0.1:5050/layerApi.aspx?cmd=new&...
Request Headersview source
Accept:application/xml, text/xml, */*; q=0.01
Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Origin:http://gwheeler4
Referer:http://gwheeler4/conceptconnect.html
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/14.0.835.186 Safari/535.1

The request is going out – I see WWT make a new layer. However, I don't get a callback. If I add an error callback that gets called, but the error property on the jqXHR object is just "error" and status is 0. If I look at the network request in Chrome I see "(cancelled)" as the status and no response.

If I take that same URL and paste it in a new browser tab, I can see that the response is the expected XML.

Of course, a difference here is that this is a GET not a POST, but I've tried that in my script and it makes no difference.

I'm pretty stumped by this and would appreciate any fresh ideas.

Best Answer

If anyone else runs into this, the issue we had was that we were making the ajax request from a link, and not preventing the link from being followed. So if you are doing this in an onclick attribute, make sure to return false; as well.