PHP script not echoing data when called via AJAX - php

Question

I have been staring at this problem for the past 2 hours and can't seem to fathom it, even after validating that everything loads correctly when scouring the console.
I basically have two sliders on my page which will eventually populate results in a table, every time I change my slider I send an array of two values to my AJAX script:
function update_results(values)
{
$.ajax({
type: "GET",
url: "./app/core/commands/update_results.php",
data: { query : values },
cache: false,
success: function(data) {
// eventually some success callback
}
});
}
The browser successfully finds update_results.php but it does not perform the logic on the page ( I assume it has found the page as the 404 error does not appear in my console. )
At this point in time the script is extremely bare-bones as I'm obviously trying to establish communication between both files:
<?php
$vals = $_GET['values'];
echo $vals;
In this case $vals is never echoed to the page, am I missing something in my AJAX? I know the values enter the function as alerted them out before attaching the PHP script.

Answer 1

Ajax Calls are suffering from Browser Cache. If your browser thinks, that he already knows the content of update.php, he will return the cached content, and not trigger the script. Therefore your
modified code might simply not get executed. (Therefore your insert query wasn't executed)
To ensure this is not happening in your case, it is always a good idea to pass a parameter (timestamp) to the script, so your browser thinks it's another outcome:
function update_results(values)
{
$.ajax({
type: "GET",
url: "./app/core/commands/update_results.php?random_parameter=" + (new Date().getTime());
data: { query : values },
cache: false,
success: function(data) {
// eventually some success callback
}
});
}
This will ensure that - at least - the browser cache is refreshed once per second for update_results.php, no matter what browser cache-settings or server-side cache advices are telling.

Answer 2

when Ajax is done, the success callback is triggered and the output of you php script is saved in data.
you can handle the data like this:
$.ajax({
type: "GET",
url: "./app/core/commands/update_results.php",
data: { query : values },
cache: false,
dataType: "text",
success: function(data) {
document.write( data )
}
});
PHP, running at server, is unaware of what happening at the front-end browser and it simply respond to ajax request as any other normal http request. So the failure of SQL query has nothing to do with javascript, which only responsible for sending ajax request and receiving and handling the response. I guess there's some errors in your php script.