Redirect on Ajax Jquery Call

Question

I am newbie to ajax here and I know somebody would have encountered this problem already. I have a legacy app built on Spring MVC, it has a interceptor(filter) that redirects the user to the login page whenever there is no session.

public class SessionCheckerInterceptor extends HandlerInterceptorAdapter {
 public boolean preHandle(HttpServletRequest request,
   HttpServletResponse response, Object handler) throws Exception {
  HttpSession session = request.getSession();

  // check if userInfo exist in session
  User user = (User) session.getAttribute("user");
  if (user == null) {
   response.sendRedirect("login.htm");
   return false;
  }
  return true;
 }
}

For non-xmlhttp request, this works fine.. but when I try to use ajax in my application, everything gets weird, it is not able to redirect to the login page correctly. As check the value of the

xhr.status = 200 textStatus = parseError errorThrown = "Invalid JSON -Markup of my HTML Login Page-

$(document).ready(function(){
        jQuery.ajax({
            type: "GET",
            url: "populateData.htm",
            dataType:"json",
            data:"userId=SampleUser",
            success:function(response){
             //code here
            },
         error: function(xhr, textStatus, errorThrown) {
                alert('Error!  Status = ' + xhr.status);
             }

        });
});

I checked on my firebug that there is a 302 HTTP response but I am not sure how to catch the response and redirect the user to the login page. Any idea here? Thanks.

Answer 1

JQuery is looking for a json type result, but because the redirect is processed automatically, it will receive the generated html source of your login.htm page.

One idea is to let the the browser know that it should redirect by adding a redirect variable to to the resulting object and checking for it in JQuery:

$(document).ready(function(){ 
    jQuery.ajax({ 
        type: "GET", 
        url: "populateData.htm", 
        dataType:"json", 
        data:"userId=SampleUser", 
        success:function(response){ 
            if (response.redirect) {
                window.location.href = response.redirect;
            }
            else {
                // Process the expected results...
            }
        }, 
     error: function(xhr, textStatus, errorThrown) { 
            alert('Error!  Status = ' + xhr.status); 
         } 

    }); 
}); 

You could also add a Header Variable to your response and let your browser decide where to redirect. In Java, instead of redirecting, do response.setHeader("REQUIRES_AUTH", "1") and in JQuery you do on success(!):

//....
        success:function(response){ 
            if (response.getResponseHeader('REQUIRES_AUTH') === '1'){ 
                window.location.href = 'login.htm'; 
            }
            else {
                // Process the expected results...
            }
        }
//....

Hope that helps.

My answer is heavily inspired by this thread which shouldn't left any questions in case you still have some problems.