handle ajax error when a user clicks refresh

Question

i apologise if this is something i should be able to look up. all of the terms i wanted were way overloaded..

here is my problem: when i open a page, it fires off a

Answer 1

[this is an edit from the previous answer, which had outstanding questions that I have since resolved]

jQuery throws the error event when the user navigates away from the page either by refreshing, clicking a link, or changing the URL in the browser. You can detect these types of errors by by implementing an error handler for the ajax call, and inspecting the xmlHttpRequest object:

$.ajax({
    /* ajax options omitted */
    error: function (xmlHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) {
         if(xmlHttpRequest.readyState == 0 || xmlHttpRequest.status == 0) 
              return;  // it's not really an error
         else
              // Do normal error handling
});