~ overflow ~

As much as I like jQuery I must admit that it’s far away from simplifying things. Although it might be a great idea using it on 100% jQuery scripts, it’s a real bad idea using it to refurbish an old script.

Today I’ve spent over 2 hours implement jQuery on a old script I have, and I felt into so many issues that it didn’t worth at all.

My script was simple, I had a huge variable list that could be edited by a form, script loops through the variables building a form with input fields for each variable. I will not get into specific details because it’s boring, but I needed to allow the user to add a new variable inside an array, so i thought that jQuery would help a lot since i only would need to dynamic add a new input field as needed then post everything back to script to save the file.

First I spent an hour figuring out that jQuery was ruining the text by converting the whole thing into UTF-8, loosing all the accents, eventually I found out about contentType encoding ajax variable:

contentType:"application/json; charset=utf-8"

which could be changed to the charset i wanted.

It was useless, jQuery still posting into the wrong charset, there’s some other tweks on this, but they are also useless.

I was able to fix the accent issue with this php statement:

mb_convert_encoding(urldecode($variable),”ISO-8859-1″,”auto”);

This is much more obscure though, but I was familiar with it since i coded in japanese charsets which are a pain to convert.

After having this cleared, and searching a lot of useless blogs and postings, turns out that jQuery was using the hard coded form names to post the data, which could be overlapped by an dynamic added field, I did a script to change the name of the hard coded inputs, something like this:

$(“#field_id”).attr(’name’,’new_name’);

Theorically, it worked, but when I did:

$(“#form”).serialize();

jQuery used the dynamic fields with the ordinary hard coded ignoring the attr changes.

Now I had to add a handler to dynamic convert and read all the inputs and do my own serialize in order to TRY to make it work…and that’s because i didn’t tested it on IE yet.

So that’s when I quit using jQuery for this script and do something plain and simple, which took me about 20 minutes and 0 searches.

It looks like that if I had used DOM elements for the whole form, all elements generated by jQuery itself, not hard coded, i would have less trouble with the form, although, the charset issues still.

Super Fun Sources:

Stack overflow posting

Stack overflow posting 2

jQuery Ajax Documentation (completly useless since contentType explanation has 2 lines)