handle ajax error when a user clicks refresh

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There are several suggested approaches for detecting this:

  • Several have suggested the use of a beforeunload handler to set a boolean flag so that the error handler can know that the page is being unloaded (See list of related/duplicated posts below). This is great, except that mobile Safari on iOS doesn’t support the beforeunload event.

  • Sachindra suggested an approach where instead of firing the error function immediately, it got delayed a second in a setTimeout(..., 1000). That way, there is a good chance the page has actually disappeared by the time the error handler gets called. “Good chance” that is. I bet if I have a huge page with e.g. many <input>s, it could take more than 1 sec to unload, and then perhaps the error handler would fire anyway.

I therefore suggest a combination of reliably detecting beforeunload support and if beforeunload is not supported (cough iPad/iPhone cough) revert to Sachindra’s delay trick.

See the full solution with beforeunload detection and all in this jsfiddle.

It looks like the situation is a little better for jQuery 2.x than for 1.x, but 2.x also seems a little flakey, and so I still find this suggestion prudent.

P.S: There were also suggestions involving testing some fields in the XHR / jqXHR object. (Here and here). I have not come accross a combination that could distinguish between user navigation and restarting the webserver during a long-running AJAX call, and I have therefore not found this approach useful to me.

This is really also an answer to these related/duplicated Stack Overflow questions:

and these posts outside of Stack Overflow:

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