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ajax
Using jQuery to load an XML configuration file
Mar 11th
At work I’m integrating Viamichelin’s map api on a site and I realized a Javascript class which works as a proxy to Viamichelin’s services.
The api provide several methods to customize appearance of map’s controls and ui components (colors, dimensions, opacity and so on) but following the api’s documentation and examples this means to have several “hard coded” settings inside my code, which is an issue I want to avoid, so I thought to use an external XML configuration file and then call the methods using parametric values (which are retrieved by reading the file). Is pretty simple with ajax to load a text file, the only problem is that by default (or better, by nature) ajax is asynchronous and this can be an obstacle but fortunately with jQuery (but even with other libraries and personal XMLHttpRequest implementation) we can make synchronous calls by specifying it.
Handle multiple ajax calls in a fixed incremental order
Nov 10th
In a project which I’m working on, I’ve realized a Javascript object (I’ve called it MediaBrowser), which displays images and flv videos into a box (a dynamic div rendered at runtime). The data used by this object is contained into multiple XML files, which are loaded by ajax (potentially it can loads infinite files passed as array of urls). The problem was: ajax is by definition asynchronous, so each time I load the page with my cool MediaBrowser, the order in which the objects (images and videos) are processed and displayed varies based on the order in which responses to the ajax calls are returned. IE: if I call file_1.xml, file_2.xml and file_3.xml, which contain respectively:
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