Error handling in getJSON calls

I know it's been a while since someone answerd here and the poster probably already got his answer either from here or from somewhere else. I do however think that this post will help anyone looking for a way to keep track of errors and timeouts while doing getJSON requests. Therefore below my answer to the question

The getJSON structure is as follows (found on http://api.jqueri.com):

$(selector).getJSON(url,data,success(data,status,xhr))

most people implement that using

$.getJSON(url, datatosend, function(data){
    //do something with the data
});

where they use the url var to provide a link to the JSON data, the datatosend as a place to add the "?callback=?" and other variables that have to be send to get the correct JSON data returned, and the success funcion as a function for processing the data.

You can however add the status and xhr variables in your success function. The status variable contains one of the following strings : "success", "notmodified", "error", "timeout", or "parsererror", and the xhr variable contains the returned XMLHttpRequest object (found on w3schools)

$.getJSON(url, datatosend, function(data, status, xhr){
    if (status == "success"){
        //do something with the data
    }else if (status == "timeout"){
        alert("Something is wrong with the connection");
    }else if (status == "error" || status == "parsererror" ){
        alert("An error occured");
    }else{
        alert("datatosend did not change");
    }         
});

This way it is easy to keep track of timeouts and errors without having to implement a custom timeout tracker that is started once a request is done.

Hope this helps someone still looking for an answer to this question.

This is quite an old thread, but it does come up in Google search, so I thought I would add a jQuery 3 answer using promises. This snippet also shows:

• You no longer need to switch to $.ajax to pass in your bearer token
• Uses .then() to make sure you can process synchronously any outcome (I was coming across this problem .always() callback firing too soon - although I'm not sure that was 100% true)
• I'm using .always() to simply show the outcome whether positive or negative
• In the .always() function I'm updating two targets with the HTTP Status code and message body

The code snippet is:

    $.getJSON({
         url: "https://myurl.com/api",
         headers: { "Authorization": "Bearer " + user.access_token}
    }).then().always(   function (data, textStatus) {
        $("#txtAPIStatus").html(data.status);
        $("#txtAPIValue").html(data.responseText);
    });