Polymer, iron-ajax, and PHP back end - how to receive an array?

Question

I have a simple iron-ajax element like this:

<iron-ajax id="ajax_email"></iron-ajax>

Then later in javascript I add some parameters to the request, one of them being an array:

var request = this.$$("#ajax_email");
request.params.to = "[email protected]";
request.params.subject = "a cool test";
request.params.content = "some content";
var cc = ["[email protected]", "[email protected]", "[email protected]"]
request.params.cc = cc;
request.generateRequest();

I have a simple PHP script that takes all these parameters, but can't figure out how to receive the "cc" array.

If I try with the GET method, iron-ajax generates the querystring like this:

[email protected]&[email protected]&[email protected]

instead of

url?cc[][email protected]&cc[][email protected]&cc[][email protected]

So, $_GET["cc"] in PHP only gets the last value of the array, "[email protected]".

When I try the POST method instead, $_POST is alway empty...

Anyone knows how to pass arrays with iron-ajax?

Answer 1

Ah well, I ended up doing a workaround with the PHP backend, to manually extract all the values from the query string. something like this:

$query = explode("&", $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']);
$params = array();
foreach ($query as $param) {
  if(!empty($param)){
    $temp = explode('=', $param, 2);
    if(isset($temp[1]) && $temp[1] !== ""){
      list($name, $value) = explode('=', $param, 2);
      $params[$name][] = urldecode($value);
    }
  }
}

Answer 2

You could use JSON.stringify(array) to turn your array into a string in JavaScript and parse it in an php object in your backend , using json_decode($_GET['array']). This should work with iron-ajax's params