HTML page as AJAX response?

Question

Can I send an entire HTML page with an AJAX response? If so, how to render that HTML page and what are the pros and cons doing that. The reason why I am asking this question is I found out that if we use response.sendRedirect("index.html") as a reply to an AJAX request in servlet we get the indx.html as AJAX response XML.

Answer 1

Your question doesn't make much sense and I can't quite tell what you're asking - the response to an ajax request will be whatever the server sends back. It could be plain text, XML, HTML, a fragment of an HTML/XML document etc. What you can do with depends on your script. If you're using a library like jQuery, what happens on the client side and what you can do with the response can also depend on how the library interprets the response (Is it a script? It it HTML/XML or JSON?).

if we use response.sendRedirect("index.html") as a reply to ajax request in servlet we get the indx.html as ajax response xml. Can some one pls explain this

An ajax request will behave much like a 'regular' HTTP request. So when you send back a redirect from your server (HTTPServletResponse#sendRedirect), the browser follows the redirect just like it would for any other request. If your ajax request was to a resource that required HTTP BASIC authentication, you'd see a prompt to login, just like you would if you visited the URL directly in a new browser window.