SJAX - Synchronous Javascript and XML

Lian answered my question regarding how to implement a synchronous model of AJAX (although once we follow a synchronous model it really isn't AJAX anymore, but SJAX). I updated my EE post, although they may delete the question as it wasn't officially answered within EE: Here is the link to the question.

The trick was to NOT use the onreadystatechange. Here is a copy of the full function that uses the synchronous request. (Sorry about the bad white space formating, eblogger screws it up):


function makeSyncRequest(data, field){
originalField = field;
var fullURL = document.URL;
var loyaltyLocation = fullURL.indexOf("/loyalty/") + 9;
var url = fullURL.substr(0,loyaltyLocation) + "ajax?";
http_request = false;

if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // Mozilla, Safari,...
http_request = new XMLHttpRequest();
if (http_request.overrideMimeType) {
http_request.overrideMimeType('text/xml');
}
} else if (window.ActiveXObject) { // IE
try {
http_request = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP");
} catch (e) {
try {
http_request = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
} catch (e) {}
}
}
if (!http_request) {
alert('Giving up :( Cannot create an XMLHTTP instance');
return false;
}
http_request.open('GET', url + data, false);
http_request.send(null);

if(http_request.status == 200) {
var xmldoc = http_request.responseXML;
var ajaxValue = xmldoc.getElementsByTagName("Root")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
if (ajaxValue == "0") {
alert("DCL " + validatingDCL + " is invalid.");
setTimeout("originalField.select()", 5);
}
}

}

Thanks Lian!

I decided to pull the validating of DCL out of the onkeyup trigger and put in the onblur action to avoid all sorts of crap, the only thing is that if the user ever goes to a different window, the on-blur fires, and if the DCL is invalid, an error message comes up, which re-fires the on-blur so I get an endless loop of error messages. So I put a flag in the validate so that if I get the error it sets a flag which prevents it from revalidation, until the error message is done. This was only possible in Synchonized mode, and not Asynchronous, so this really comes in handy to get around the on-blur firing repeatedly.