Jquery – nodejs express, ajax posting w/ jquery and receiving response

ajaxexpressjquerynode.js

Having some trouble getting express to respond properly to my jquery ajax request. The actual posting is working fine, but no matter what I try I cant seem to actually get a data response from my app that I can use. At first it was just posting and hanging constantly, and like a minute later it would respond with an alert that said something like "XML Document loaded" (have no idea where it was coming from) — Anyways, now its giving me

SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL
at parse (native)
at IncomingMessage.

In my express App, I have:

    app.post('/save', function(req, res) {
      console.log(req.body.objectData);
      res.contentType('json');
      res.send({ some: 'json' });
    });

and in my jquery:

  $.ajax({
    url: "/save",
    type: "POST",
    dataType: "json",
    data: {objectData: someObject},
    contentType: "application/json",
    cache: false,
    timeout: 5000,
    complete: function() {
      //called when complete
      console.log('process complete');
    },

    success: function(data) {
      console.log(data);
      console.log('process sucess');
   },

    error: function() {
      console.log('process error');
    },
  });

Best Solution

You are not sending a valid JSON response but a String containing the word json therefore the JSON.parse() is failing on the client side. Try this:

app.post('/save', function(req, res) {
  console.log(req.body.objectData);
  res.contentType('json');
  res.send({ some: JSON.stringify({response:'json'}) });
});

JavaScript Object Notation is a way to share data between applications in object format. However, you cannot send an object over an HTTP request without first turning it into a string and sending it as a single variable. The functions JSON.parse() and JSON.stringify() do this for us.

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