Ajax Submissions (Different Concept)

[Jazz914]

I'm currently trying to get used to JQuery, but personally I prefer Prototypejs and scriptalicious.

Basically my question is, I see loads of tutorials on submitting forms via ajax to a designated and absolute file path such as "/process.php", but i've never seen the concept of ajax forms being submitted with the php file itself, I can see why not but i'm wondering if its possible. An example would be:


<form action="" method="post" id="blah">
Fields here
</form>
<?php
/*Have the ajax submission process this code instead of an external file*/
?>


I ask this, because it would seem like a good thing to know as it would make life easier, I understand the problems which can come from this such as if you're using a templating system it would just load the whole page into the specified response location.

But my question is, is it possible WITHOUT loading the whole webpage into the div..

I pretty much know the answer but I'm not fluent in javascript so it would be nice if this theory would be confirmed from some of you javascript guru's out there ^_^
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PS: If this IS possible, in one framework but not the other, I don't mind just let me know which :)

[Jazz914]

Bumpy.

No-one has any clue if this is or not possible? :O

[VIPStephan]

I’m not sure about AJAX submissions but you can load part of a page into an element with jQuery’s load() (http://api.jquery.com/load/) function (see section “Loading page fragments”). So you can have a complete page as basic functionality if JS isn’t avaliable and if it is then you only load a part of the other page into the current one.

Not sure if that’s what you mean?

[Jazz914]

I'll try explaining a different way :)

Okay, I have a HTML form which is being validated by PHP
<div id="response"></div><form action="/validate.php" method="post" id="blah">
Fields here
</form>

This form would post the data to a php file called "/validate.php", but I generally don't do this what I do is keep all the error checking in the same file like so:

<div id="response"></div><form action="" method="post" id="blah">
Fields here
</form>
<?php
if (isset($_POST['submit'])) {
// Validate the forms data
}
?>

Now with the first method what i'd do with javascript is include in the code the file path known as "validate.php", which would be fine and returning it in a div named "response"

But with the second method I am posting the data to the file itself which means if I were to include the path to the page itself it would load the entire website into the div as well as the response, so the #response is almost like an iframe, because posting the file to itself JavaScript is being receiving the post data and the website, and that's what its returning.

------
another example

If the codingforums form was posting like I am explaining here we'll take the preview feature before posting a message, instead of previewing JUST the post you'd see "http://codingforums.com/newreply.php?do=postreply&t=195715" in the preview box (The full website)

I am sorry if i'm not explaining myself good enough, the concept is fairly tricky to understand D:

[VIPStephan]

No, I see what you’re saying. But wouldn’t a same-file validation just require an update of the current data? Like you’re filling out a form, posting the submission to a script on the same page via AJAX, and depending on the outcome update the respective information (i. e. replace one text string with the new one) on the page?

[Jazz914]

Yeah, but it includes the whole page of the site, so because I am using a template system and everything is included via the index page.

So its posting to a new page and returning the iframe like div (With the data submitted) inside the response div.

I am not really a javascript person, so I don't know what the possibilities of the language is and I wouldn't know how to approach / Search for something like this because if I search for "AJax Form Submissions" they all return results stating things like create an external php file.. I have never found one which lets you use the same php file whilst using a navigation system like this..