Detecting a redirect in ajax request?

Question

I want to use jQuery to GET a URL and explicitly check if it responded with a 302 redirect, but not follow the redirect.

jQuery\'s $.ajax appea

Answer 1

Welcome to the future!

Right now we have a "responseURL" property from xhr object. YAY!

See How to get response url in XMLHttpRequest?

However, jQuery (at least 1.7.1) doesn't give an access to XMLHttpRequest object directly. You can use something like this:

var xhr;
var _orgAjax = jQuery.ajaxSettings.xhr;
jQuery.ajaxSettings.xhr = function () {
  xhr = _orgAjax();
  return xhr;
};

jQuery.ajax('http://test.com', {
  success: function(responseText) {
    console.log('responseURL:', xhr.responseURL, 'responseText:', responseText);
  }
});

It's not a clean solution and i suppose jQuery team will make something for responseURL in the future releases.

TIP: just compare original URL with responseUrl. If it's equal then no redirect was given. If it's "undefined" then responseUrl is probably not supported. However as Nick Garvey said, AJAX request never has the opportunity to NOT follow the redirect but you may resolve a number of tasks by using responseUrl property.