Catching 302 FOUND in JavaScript

Question

I use jQuery to make an AJAX POST request to my server, which can return HTTP response with status 302. Then JavaScript just sends GET request to this URL, while I'd like to redirect user to URL in this response. Is this possible?

Answer 1

The accepted answer does not work for the reasons given. I posted a comment with a link to a question that described a hack to get round the problem of the 302 being transparently handled by the browser:

How to manage a redirect request after a jQuery Ajax call

However, it is a bit of a dirty hack and after much digging around I found what I think is a better solution - use JSON. In this case, you can make all responses to ajax requests have the code 200 and, in the body of the response, you add some sort of JSON object which your ajax response handler can then use in the appropriate manner.

Answer 2

I don't think so. The W3C says that HTTP redirects with certain status codes, including 302, must be transparently followed. Quoted below:

If the response is an HTTP redirect (status code 301, 302, 303 or 307), then it MUST be transparently followed (unless it violates security or infinite loop precautions). Any other error (including a 401) MUST cause the object to use that error page as the response.

As an experiment, I tried doing Ajax requests from various browsers (Firefox 3.5, Chrome, IE8, IE7, IE6) to a server giving a 302 status code, and showing the status in the browser's request object. In every case, it showed up as 200.