jquery AJAX stopped working with iOS 5.0.1

Question

The following piece of logic used to work with both jquery 1.4.4 and 1.7.1 on all mobile devices that we're supporting:

$.ajax({
  url: 'http://www.example.com/someurl',
  type: 'GET',
  dataType: 'text',
  timeout: 60000,
  success: function(data) {
    alert(data);
  },
  error: function(jqXHR) {
    alert(jqXHR.state());
  }
});

But with iOS 5.0.1, the above enters the error function alerting rejected without any actual HTTP requests. It seems that exactly one AJAX request will work before I need to restart my iPhone. Is this a known jquery / iOS 5.0 problem? How can I debug it? Is there any workaround? I don't know where to start looking.

NOTE: I've noticed on the server side, that instead of GET requests, OPTIONS requests are issued. This seems to be a related issue:

http://spin.atomicobject.com/2012/01/20/mobile-safari-on-ios-5-1-unexpectedly-making-cross-origin-resource-sharing-requests/

Have you looked at the traffic between the phone and the server using something like Charles? — tkone
– tkone, Commented Feb 9, 2012 at 12:27
@tkone: Hmm, yes I could find some traffic being blocked by our web entry server. It seems that the iPhone issues an HTTP OPTIONS request, which we reject... But why...? — Lukas Eder
– Lukas Eder, Commented Feb 9, 2012 at 13:25
that's very odd. Do you have a sample page I can point my phone at? I have an iOS4 device as well I want to see if it happens on as we are about redo our mobile site to rely extensively on ajax... — tkone
– tkone, Commented Feb 9, 2012 at 14:00
@tkone: Unfortunately, no. I can't make this publicly available... :-/ But iOS4 is still fine — Lukas Eder
– Lukas Eder, Commented Feb 9, 2012 at 14:10
@tkone: N.B. I'm starting to feel that iOS 5 doesn't send cookies with XMLHttpRequest :-/ — Lukas Eder
– Lukas Eder, Commented Feb 9, 2012 at 14:43

Lukas Eder · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-09 15:56:56Z

5

The link that I provided in the question is actually pointing to the solution. Some of my ajax requests are used to fetch URL's of PDFs which are streamed using

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="somename.pdf"

Apparently, that causes major issues in iOS 5.0's Safari, breaking the XMLHttpRequest object (it is not related with jquery). Crazy. Here's the link again:

http://spin.atomicobject.com/2012/01/20/mobile-safari-on-ios-5-1-unexpectedly-making-cross-origin-resource-sharing-requests/

answered Feb 9, 2012 at 15:56

Lukas Eder

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2 Comments

tkone Over a year ago

So it was the content-disposition header that is causing it to break? You should file a bug at radar.apple.com about this -- I didn't find one when searching in there. Thanks for the tip!

Lukas Eder Over a year ago

@tkone: Good idea! Filed as issue 10835750

Evgenii · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-10 12:25:48Z

1

Thank you for the investigation. I am having the same problem. After receiving a file as 'attachment' Mobile Safari sends OPTIONS request when calling:

$.ajax('/url')

BUT, if I run the following code from the same file, it generates a valid GET request:

http = new XMLHttpRequest()     
http.open("GET", "/url")
http.send()

Why jQuery is not working but XMLHttpRequest works here?

answered May 10, 2012 at 12:25

Evgenii

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Comments

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:06:25Z

-1

The reason for the error is the same origin policy. It only allows you to do XMLHTTPRequests to your own domain. See if you can use JSON instead.

References and recommended resources;
https://stackoverflow.com/a/1109261/896341
http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.getJSON/
http://www.w3.org/Security/wiki/Same_Origin_Policy
https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Same_origin_policy_for_JavaScript

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:06

CommunityBot

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answered Feb 9, 2012 at 14:12

Stefan

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1 Comment

Lukas Eder Over a year ago

I'm sending the request to the same domain. All requests are sent to the real-life equivalent of http://www.example.com. JSON is not an option in our setup...

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