January 18, 2002 - Asynchronous XML Loading | WebReference

January 18, 2002 - Asynchronous XML Loading

Yehuda Shiran January 18, 2002
Asynchronous XML Loading
Tips: January 2002

Yehuda Shiran, Ph.D.
Doc JavaScript

By default, when you ask JavaScript to load an XML file, the browser won't wait for the loading to complete and will run the next line of the script. To ask the browser to wait for the loading to complete, assign the async property to false. Here is a script segment that does it: 

  xmldoc = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.DOMDocument.3.0");
  xmldoc.async = false;
Once you set async to true (default), the browser will run the script in parallel while loading the XML file. To control the loading process, the readyState variable provides four different states that describe the status of the file: 1 (before loading), 2 (trying), 3 (parsing successful), and 4 (loading successful).