%5Bobject%20Object%5D (404 not found) when attempting to submit via AJAX

ajax, jquery, post

Solution

As andi said, $.post expects an URL string as a first parameter; if you want to pass an option object, you must use $.ajax.

When you try to call `$.post(<option object>)`, the option object is used as an URL; in that process, it is cast to a string (and an object cast to a string becomes `[object <type>]` in Javascript; in this case, `[object Object]`), it gets URL-encoded (`%5Bobject%20Object%5D`), and, since it does not start with a `/` or a protocol name, it is interpreted as a relative URL and gets prefixed with the current protocol, domain and path. Then, since there are no more parameters, an empty POST AJAX request is sent to that URL.

Another problem is that you use `&amp;` to separate the parameters; that should be done only in HTML, here you should just use `&`. (Or a data object, as Evan said, that way you don't need do think about encoding issues.) And `.val()` and `.attr('value')` are not the same; the first is the current value of the field, the second is whatever value it had when the page was loaded.

The simplest way to this correctly is this:

function insertData() {
    var data = $('#dataid,#industry,#geolocation').serialize();
    $.post('http://myURL/database/InsertData.php', data);
    return false;
}

This assumes that the three fields have the same `name` and `id` as $.serialize uses `name` for the parameter name.

Problem

Original source