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JavaScript AJAX Basics (retiring) AJAX Concepts GET and POST

Posted by Daniel Wagner
Daniel Wagner
13,389 Points

Can GET be used to send data to a server?

In the "AJAX Basics" course the teacher states "The GET method is a simple way to send data to a web server." Is this correct? Up till that point I thought it was only to retrieve data from the server?

2 Answers

Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,148 Points
Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,148 Points

Matt is correct. You can send data to the server via GET. It's obviously insecure, since the information is just hanging out there for everyone to see in the URL

Where GET request really shine is let's say you have an application that has many ways to filter by. Let's say I'm shopping for cars, and I filter by 2010 and newer, blue paint, SUV, and 4x4. All of these values could be in a get request so the server knows what filters to use. Because it's a get request, I can copy and paste URL as is to my wife, send it an an email, and when she clicks it, she would have the exact same filters set just how I had them, and thus see the exact same filtered results.

Graeme Oxley
Graeme Oxley
8,931 Points
Graeme Oxley
Graeme Oxley
8,931 Points

Good answer. I actually work for one of the industry's leading automotive dealer website firms, and our inventory search pages work exactly like that. The site requests data from a JSON file containing all of the dealer's inventory information broken down into every characteristic for that vehicle and returned to the page in real-time as users check and uncheck the filter options. Affixing "?make=Ford" will filter out everything except Fords, and "?year=2011" will produce nothing but 2011 vehicles of any make or model.

Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,148 Points
Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,148 Points

Hey cool, thanks! It's a great way for a common problem.

Matt F.
Matt F.
9,518 Points
Matt F.
Matt F.
9,518 Points

That is correct - you need to send the server some type of data in order for it to respond correctly.

For example, even if you just do a simple GET request to the route '/myRoute' it is still going to send the HTTP GET request's data to the server. This data will allow the server to determine whether the request is a GET, POST, PUT, etc, among other things.

You can also specify parameters in the URL of a GET request to use in server-side logic.

While it is possible to send JSON in the body of a GET request, it is not how GETs are expected to work.