CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascripthtmlxml
elykl33t
elykl33t

Reputation: 1

Javascript function not loading xml properly

Hey guys, I've looked around online and on here a fair amount in order to try and figure out what the problem with this is. I am a newbie to anything not html, and I can not figure out why this XML is not loading.

Say I just have two files, "/contact.xml" and "/xmltest.html" and I want to load the xml into the html page using javascript. Here is what I have so far.

<html>
<body>
<h1>Carney Contacts Test</h1>
<b>Name:</b> <span id="name"></span><br />
<b>Email:</b> <span id="email"></span><br />
<b>Phone:</b> <span id="number"></span>

<script type="text/javascript">
var xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();

xmlhttp.open("GET","contacts.xml",false);
xmlhttp.send();
xmlDoc=xmlhttp.responseXML;

document.getElementById("name").innerHTML=
xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("name")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;

document.getElementById("email").innerHTML=
xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("email")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;

document.getElementById("phone").innerHTML=
xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("phone")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
</script>

</body>

Much of this was directly off the w3c site, and I still can not get it to work! Chrome is giving me "Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method 'getElementsByTagName' of null", if that helps anyone.

Help appreciated!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 5532

Answers (2)

bobince
bobince

Reputation: 536379

How are you serving contacts.xml? Check it gets an appropriate Content-Type for XML, eg text/xml.

If you aren't serving contacts.xml at all, but just accessing it from the file system, well, that's your problem. Some browsers (Chrome, IE with native XMLHttpRequest) don't allow a web page on the filesystem to read other documents from the filesystem, as it's a clear security risk. Open up the JS console in Chrome's developer tools and you'll see the explanatory error:

XMLHttpRequest cannot load file:///.../contacts.xml. Cross origin requests are only supported for HTTP.

Chuck your files on a local web server and it should work fine.

Upvotes: 0

TeaDrivenDev
TeaDrivenDev

Reputation: 6629

You missed the next part on the site (I suppose by "w3c" you mean w3schools.com):

if (window.DOMParser)
  {
  parser=new DOMParser();
  xmlDoc=parser.parseFromString(text,"text/xml");
  }
else // Internet Explorer
  {
  xmlDoc=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
  xmlDoc.async="false";
  xmlDoc.loadXML(text);
  }

The XML text needs to be loaded into a DOM parser; in your above code, xmlDoc is just an arbitrary variable without any DOM parsing abilities.

But I guess the first problem is that you're maybe just opening the HTML file via the local file system - in that case your XML document will never be loaded, because an XMLHttpRequest only works via HTTP; it can only load stuff from a web server, not from the file system (which is why the responseXML is null, as the browser reports).

Upvotes: 1

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