JQuery can't find element in XMLDocument only in Firefox

Question

I have a call to a webservice that is returning the next raw response

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Length: 1516
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8
Server: Microsoft-IIS/8.5
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Origin, X-Requested-With, Content-Type, Accept
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2016 10:28:58 GMT

<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
    <s:Body>
        <OperationListResponse xmlns="http://tempuri.org/">
            <OperationListResult xmlns:a="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
                <a:data>123</a:data>
                <a:operation_id i:nil="true"/>
                <a:status>OK</a:status>
            </OperationListResult>
        </OperationListResponse>
    </s:Body>
</s:Envelope>

When I get this XML in my javascript code, I'm trying to read the element "status" using the next code:

//dataResponse is my javascript valid XMLDocument
x = $(dataResponse).find('status').text();

And instead of getting "OK", I'm getting "". This only happens in Firefox. The weird thing is that it works great in Chrome, Opera, Edge and Safari. While debugging in Firefox, making a watch to the dataResponse object, I can actually see that the node "status" has the value "OK".

Any clue on how to solve this issue?

Edit: I've tried doing the changes that Jai suggested, and I got weird results from firefox. If I Watch a variable that makes the "find", I can see the text. If i try to find by directly typing the "$(dados).find('a\:status').text()", i cant see any results. Firefox watch panel:

Chrome watch panel:

`x = $(dataResponse).find('a\\:status').text();` try with escaping the colon. — Jai, Feb 12 '16 at 10:49
Maybe you need to share some more code, with the part of the request and how you read and parse it. — Marcos Pérez Gude, Feb 12 '16 at 10:49
@Jai it has a lot of sense. Add an answer, for sure it will be checked as correct. — Marcos Pérez Gude, Feb 12 '16 at 10:50
I'd go with Jai's comment but then i'm really not sure why your posted code was working on other browsers....? — A. Wolff, Feb 12 '16 at 10:50
I don't see how this works in any browser, given the tag is ``, not ``...? — Rory McCrossan, Feb 12 '16 at 10:51
ok, I've escaped the the a:status. Got great response from Firefox, it did found the element.But now Chrome can't find it. I can't comprehend why this happens — RSilva, Feb 12 '16 at 11:13

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 12 '16 at 10:53

2

As i posted in comments to escape the : with \\:

x = $(dataResponse).find('a\\:status').text();

Still, it does not make any sense, that worked in other browsers but firefox.

answered Feb 12 '16 at 10:53

Jai

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This just worked great in Firefox, but in Chrome I'm getting now a x="", in the "watch" panel. Also, tried a:status in Chrome and it didn't worked too. – RSilva Feb 12 '16 at 11:05

the8472 · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-12T12:28:32.077

Jquery probably doesn't have anything to do with this, besides being the wrong tool for the job. For element lookups it mostly delegates to querySelectorAll. XML Documents have namespaces, and selectors have special handling for namespaces.

But namespace shorthands require that mappings from shorthand to namespace URIs are first declared. E.g. XPath lookups do that through Document.evaluate's namespace resolver argument and selectors in stylesheets retrieve them from @namespace declarations

querySelectorAll does not take arguments that support such namespace resolution, therefore only no-namespace, default-namespace and any-namespace selectors can be specified.

In other words, it's not possible to match a status element in the a -> http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/ namespace with a a|status selector through querySelectorAll, in fact, it should actually throw an exception. And a:status would just be a pseudo element selector that's not known to the browser.

A more generic *|status selector should match it, but it could potentially overmatch by also selecting status elements from other namespaces.

If you want to do namespace-aware traversal in XML documents you probably should use XPath instead.

JQuery can't find element in XMLDocument only in Firefox

2 Answers2