Why can I not return responseText from an Ajax function? [duplicate]

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• How do I return the response from an asynchronous call? 35 answers

Here is part of my Ajax function. For some reason that I cannot figure out, I am able to alert() responseText but not able to return responseText. Can anybody help? I need that value to be used in another function.

http.onreadystatechange = function(){
    if( http.readyState == 4 && http.status == 200 ){
        return http.responseText;
    }
}

Answer 1

You will not be able to handle the return value that you are returning from your asynchronous callback. You should handle the responseText within the callback directly, or call a helper function to handle the response:

http.onreadystatechange = function () {
    if (http.readyState == 4 && http.status == 200) {
        handleResponse(http.responseText);
    }
}

function handleResponse (response) {
    alert(response);
}

Answer 2

What about :

function handleResponse (response) {
    return response;
}

which return undefined for synchrounous and asynchronous modes

Answer 3

function getdata(url,callback)
{
    var xmlhttp;
    if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
      {// code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
      xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
      }
    else
      {// code for IE6, IE5
      xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
      }
    xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function()
      {
      if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==200)
        {
         var result = xmlhttp.responseText;
         callback(result)
        }
      }
    xmlhttp.open("POST",url,true);
    xmlhttp.send();
}

send a call back function name as second arguement to this function. You can get the response text for that function. simple. But you can't directly return anything from an asynchronous call.