Why does ajax sometimes urlencode serialised data and sometimes it doesnt? - php

Question

When I send serialised data to a PHP file using ajax, it is sometimes URL Encoded depending on how i do it.
Originally i had the following code which worked fine:
$.ajax({
type: 'POST',
url: 'ajax-process.php',
data: $("#sitestructure-form").serialize(),
success: function(d){$("#structureupdate").html(d);}
});
The data was sent to my PHP file and i could echo it and it looked like this.
[{"id":20,"children":[{"id":21}]},{"id":19},{"id":18,"children":[{"id":14}]},{"id":16},{"id":13,"children":[{"id":11}]},{"id":17},{"id":15},{"id":12}]
I wanted to send more than one piece of data, I called the serialized data 'order' and added 'process' to it so i updated my code to the following:
$.ajax({
type: 'POST',
url: 'ajax-process.php',
data: {
order: $("#sitestructure-form").serialize(),
process: "sitemap-reordernavigation"
},
success: function(d){$("#structureupdate").html(d);}
});
However when I retrieve the serialised data sent in 'order' the output looks like this:
data=%5B%7B%22id%22%3A20%2C%22children%22%3A%5B%7B%22id%22%3A21%7D%5D%7D%2C%7B%22id%22%3A19%7D%2C%7B%22id%22%3A18%2C%22children%22%3A%5B%7B%22id%22%3A14%7D%5D%7D%2C%7B%22id%22%3A16%7D%2C%7B%22id%22%3A13%2C%22children%22%3A%5B%7B%22id%22%3A11%7D%5D%7D%2C%7B%22id%22%3A17%7D%2C%7B%22id%22%3A15%7D%2C%7B%22id%22%3A12%7D%5D
The only way i can think of to fix this problem is to use php to urldecode it and then use str_replace to remove the 'data=' bit at the front, like so.
$data = str_replace("data=","",urldecode($_POST['order']));
How can I get this to work with AJAX though so i dont have to urldecode it?
Ive tried using a variable and setting the processData to false however that didn't seem to work.
var order = $("#sitestructure-form").serialize();
$.ajax({
type: 'POST',
url: 'ajax-process.php',
processData: false,
data: {
order: order,
process: "sitemap-reordernavigation"
},
success: function(d){$("#structureupdate").html(d);}
});
My knowledge of AJAX/Jquery is rather limited so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

That's because you are feeding a serialized text string to the data attribute the first time around and jQuery does not convert it to a serialized string. The second you are assigning an object to the data attribute with the "order" attribute having the serialized text string, so jQuery basically double encodes it. For it to act as you'd like you would have to convert the form to an object and assign your "order" attribute to that object. See this post: Convert form data to JavaScript object with jQuery
// taking the example from the above link, you do this instead
order = $("#sitestructure-form"). serializeObject();

Answer 2

Fixed by doing the following:
$.ajax({
type: 'POST',
url: 'ajax-process.php?',
data: $("#sitestructure-form").serialize() + "&action=sitemap-reordernavigation",
success: function(d){$("#structureupdate").html(d);}
});