Handling XML Data for Ajax - Populating the Form on Other Browsers

The code for handling non-Microsoft browsers, shown in Example 4-7, is similar; there are some minor differences in the parser API, but that's about it.

Example 4-7. The nonMSPopulate( ) function

 1 function nonMSPopulate() {
 2     var resp = req.responseText;
 3     var parser = new DOMParser();
 4     var dom = parser.parseFromString(resp,"text/xml");
 5
 6     decVal = dom.getElementsByTagName("decimal");
 7     var decimal = document.getElementById('decimal');
 8     decimal.value=decVal[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
 9
10     hexVal = dom.getElementsByTagName("hexadecimal");
11     var hexadecimal = document.getElementById('hexadecimal');
12     hexadecimal.value=hexVal[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
13
14     octVal = dom.getElementsByTagName("octal");
15     var octal = document.getElementById('octal');
16     octal.value=octVal[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
17
18     hyperVal = dom.getElementsByTagName("hyper");
19     var hyper = document.getElementById('hyper');
20     hyper.value=hyperVal[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
21
22     binaryVal = dom.getElementsByTagName("binary");
23     var bin = document.getElementById('bin');
24     bin.value=binaryVal[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
25 }

We create a newDOMParser(line 3), then we create a DOM on line 4 from the XML string that we received from the servlet. Next, we get the element between the<decimal></decimal>tags (line 6) by callingdom.getElementByTagName("decimal"). After retrieving thedecimalform element from our HTML document, we retrieve the value sent to us in the XML and use it to set the appropriate field:

  decimal.value=decVal[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;

The reference todecVal[0]gets the data between the<decimal></decimal>tags. If we had two sets of<decimal></decimal>tags, we would reference the second set asdecVal[1].

This is what the data should look like in the response sent from the servlet:

  <converted-values>
      <decimal>97</decimal>
      <hexadecimal>0x61</hexadecimal>
      <octal>0141</octal>
      <hyper>&amp;0x61;</hyper>
      <binary>1100001B</binary>
  </converted-values>

Please check back next week for the conclusion to this article.