AJAX - PHP - & client upload

[george]

I have been using AJAX to send and retrieve data to my webpages, and all was fine until I discovered that I needed to upload files from the browser as well as field content. So I discovered the php way of doing this, which entails using the

	<form enctype="multipart/form-data" action="popreceipts.php" method="post" >		<input type="hidden" name="MAX_FILE_SIZE" value="300000" />Send this file: <input name="userfile" type="file" />		<input type="submit" value="Send File" />	</form>

The problem is, this forces a page reload. Isn’t there an AJAX way to get the form “file” data to the php program on the server? I only see

	xmlHttp=GetXmlHttpObject();	xmlHttp.onreadystatechange=invosent;	xmlHttp.open('POST','popreceipts.php',true);	xmlHttp.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");	xmlHttp.setRequestHeader("enctype", "multipart/form-data");	xmlHttp.setRequestHeader("Content-Length", param.length);	xmlHttp.send(param);

or the GET method. I’m sure there must be a way to upload a file from a web browser without having to reload the page. I just don’t know what it is yet.

[justsomeguy]

I’m sure there must be a way to upload a file from a web browser without having to reload the page.

Why do you think that?There's not a way to do that. The file needs to be sent to the server. The browser sends the file to the server when it makes a request. If you stop the browser from sending a request (which is what happens when the page reloads), then the file won't get sent. Javascript is not able to just get a file from the user's computer and send it to the server, if it could do that then we would have major security problems.

[george]

Why do you think that?

Because it felt good? I got the whole web app going from input screen to input screen, without ever reloading a page. Now I have to figure out how to reload and get back to where I was. Thanks for the info. Now I won't be spending the day trying to do the impossible.

[justsomeguy]

Because it felt good?

Yeah I hear you. Sometimes I like to think that the rest of the world wants to invite America over for tea and that our president can read at a fourth grade level. But yeah, sadly reality gets in the way. But it's a good thing that Javascript can't send out your files, or else ActiveX probably wouldn't be the main attack vector for online malware.