Long Poll and IE's XDomainRequest Object

Question

I'm trying to implement a chat app that uses long polling to get messages from a remote (cross domain) server.

Is there any way to do this with a XDomainRequest? It seems my connections always get terminated after a random amount of seconds/miliseconds (usually about 1-3 secs) instead of waiting for the server to respond.

The IE dev toools thell me that the request has been "aborted" with no data received.

Is the XDomainRequest just not fit for long polling or am I missing something here?

Answer 1

Had this problem too, as a race condition, using the jQuery iecors library. The IE network console showed the request as "abort" despite Fiddler showing a 200 response.

After a few stubborn rounds of googling, I came across this link which recommends filling out all the callback handlers. I suspect that onProgress was only being called, and failing, when the request was slowed by a heavy page, leading to my race behavior.

IE9 XDomainRequest issued requests may abort if all event handlers not specified

For jquery.iecors.js, it was missing the onprogress handler, in addition to a few variable name typos. Adding this line seems to fix it.

xdr.onprogress = function () {};

Answer 2

For me the issue dealt with multiple query functions running as a single batch function using XDomainRequests. WebTools showed all requests to the remote server would abort but the last. Running with alert(query) before each query worked. So I ended up moving my XDR invocation (e.g. new window.XDomainRequest) inside the loop so a new instance would be created for each query to the remote server. Each result is inserted into an different input box via getElementById(id).value. With a delay timer added I can see it runs sequentially filling in each value now with no issues. Without delay it is virtually instantaneous.