How do I pass along variables with XMLHTTPRequest

Question

How do I send variables to the server with XMLHTTPRequest? Would I just add them to the end of the URL of the GET request, like ?variable1=?v

Answer 1

Manually formatting the query string is fine for simple situations. But it can become tedious when there are many parameters.

You could write a simple utility function that handles building the query formatting for you.

function formatParams( params ){
  return "?" + Object
        .keys(params)
        .map(function(key){
          return key+"="+encodeURIComponent(params[key])
        })
        .join("&")
}

And you would use it this way to build a request.

var endpoint = "https://api.example.com/endpoint"
var params = {
  a: 1, 
  b: 2,
  c: 3
}

var url = endpoint + formatParams(params)
//=> "https://api.example.com/endpoint?a=1&b=2&c=3"

There are many utility functions available for manipulating URL's. If you have JQuery in your project you could give http://api.jquery.com/jquery.param/ a try.

It is similar to the above example function, but handles recursively serializing nested objects and arrays.