PHP Web Service with json not working

Question

I am new to web services.I have the following code and when I try to run it on the local host I am not geting the required output...it shows FirstName:undefined LastName:undefined..

following is my code

$(document).ready(function(){
 var employees = [
 { "firstName":"John" , "lastName":"Doe" }
];
$.ajax({
 url: "MyService.php",
 type: "POST",
 data: employees,
 dataType: "json",
 success:function(data) {
 alert("Firstname:"+data.firstName+", LastName: "+data.lastName);
 },
 error:function(data) {
 alert('error');
 } });
});

The php code is

echo json_encode($_POST);

• Ido Green: Can you show us the output of echo json_encode?
• MidhuN: The out put is FirstName:undefined LastName:undefined
• Rick Kuipers: We want to see the output of the PHP echo not the alert of your javascript, this can be done by opening your console in your browser and read out the response.

Answer 1

The value of data should be an object. You are passing an array containing an object. Get rid of the array.

This:

 var employees = [
 { "firstName":"John" , "lastName":"Doe" }
];

... is submitting the following to the server:

undefined=

It should be:

var employees = { 
 "firstName": "John",
 "lastName":"Doe"
};

which would submit this:

firstName=John&lastName=Doe

---

Additionally, you don't appear to be specifying a Content-Type header, so PHP is defaulting to text/html. This is forcing you to write JavaScript that says "Don't believe the server, threat this as JSON and not HTML".

You can fix that with:

header('Content-Type: application/json');
echo json_encode($_POST);