Determine if $.ajax error is a timeout

If your error event handler takes the three arguments (xmlhttprequest, textstatus, and message) when a timeout happens, the status arg will be ‘timeout’.

Per the jQuery documentation:

Possible values for the second
argument (besides null) are “timeout”,
“error”, “notmodified” and
“parsererror”.

You can handle your error accordingly then.

I created this fiddle that demonstrates this.

$.ajax({
    url: "/ajax_json_echo/",
    type: "GET",
    dataType: "json",
    timeout: 1000,
    success: function(response) { alert(response); },
    error: function(xmlhttprequest, textstatus, message) {
        if(textstatus==="timeout") {
            alert("got timeout");
        } else {
            alert(textstatus);
        }
    }
});​

With jsFiddle, you can test ajax calls — it will wait 2 seconds before responding. I put the timeout setting at 1 second, so it should error out and pass back a textstatus of ‘timeout’ to the error handler.

Hope this helps!