How to use dojo.xhrPost properly? - php

Question

Here is my JS:
<script>
dojo.require("dijit.form.Button");
function sendText(){
var button = dijit.byId("submitButton2");
dojo.connect(button, "onClick", function(event){
// The parameters to pass to xhrPost, the message, and the url to send it to
// Also, how to handle the return and callbacks.
var xhrArgs = {
//type: "POST",
url: "http://testjson.php",
content: dojo.toJson({key1:"value1",key2:"value2"},true),
handleAs: "text",
load: function(newContent){
dojo.byId("response2").innerHTML = newContent;
},
error: function(error){
// We'll 404 in the demo, but that's okay. We don't have a 'postIt' service on the
// docs server.
dojo.byId("response2").innerHTML = "Message posted.";
}
}
dojo.byId("response2").innerHTML = "Message being sent..."
// Call the asynchronous xhrPost
var deferred = dojo.xhrPost(xhrArgs);
});
}
dojo.ready(sendText);
</script>
Here is my PHP:
<?php
foreach($_POST as $key => $val) echo '$_POST["'.$key.'"]='.$val.'<br />';
?>
The problem is that nothing is being returned.
If I put content instead of postData I have $_POST[0]='{', $_POST[1]='k' etc character by character, limited to 1000. This is a big problem.
Please can somebody tell me what I'm doing wrong? I got this code right from the dojo website, so it should be alright.

Answer 1

The php $_POST array only shows form encoded data. In your example you are POSTing json, so it won't directly show up in $_POST.
You have a couple options here. You could continue to post the data as json and read the POSTed json directly from the php input stream: $data = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'));. This is probably the easiest, and it replaces accessing the $_POST array for the data.
Other options include not POSTing json (just send form encoded data) and POSTing json as form encoded data:
In that case, your content would become something like
content: 'my_post_data='+dojo.toJson({key1:"value1",key2:"value2"}, true), (you may need to change handleAs fyi)
Then on the server side you would likely see something like
$_POST['my_post_data']= '{"key1":"value1","key2":"value2"}' which could be processed by json_decode()

Answer 2

I believe your content is being sent character by character because you are converting your content object into JSON. According to the dojo.xhrPost documentation, the content property is expected to be a JavaScript Object. I hope this helps solve your problem.
It should be noted that this module is deprecated in favor of dojo/request/xhr, so it is better to use that unless you have lower version requirements.