I had a problem today with eval()'ing the responseText after
Ajax.Request.
My problem was that my response was only text/javascript - an object
in JSON:
{
  // properties of object using JSON
}
I even haven't notice that the same code worked about a week, and
everything was OK - no error, no exception.
Until I added onException handler to Ajax.Request constructor - my
application started to alerting users with errors.
I have found that:
 - Prototype eval()s responseText automatically
 - when eval()'ing, JavaScript parser looks for a block of statements/
expressions (?) (eventually enclosed in curly braces {}) and it gets
the object in JSON (surrounded in curly braces too)
 - in evalJSON() Prototype encloses the header string with ordinary
braces ()
 - the result of eval()'ing responseText isn't saved anywhere :-(
 - to get the object represented by my responseText JSON string, I
have to eval() it again (ofc, enclosing in ordinary braces (), which I
have done from the begin).

I have tought a lot about it and wasn't sure who blame for this
exception, for necessity of eval()'ing twice excessively - me or the
Prototype team.
Now I think I should redesign my application and return the data using
X-JSON headers rather than responseText.
I only think it should be stated clearly in API Docs that evaling the
responseText isn't identical to evaling the X-JSON headers and that
the first one should be rather used for scripts to be executed (and
not remebered) and the latter only for JSON.
Or maybe it's a prototype design mistake - returning JSON with
responseText is OK and it shouldn't be evaluated automagically but
only on user demand. Or the other way round - it should be evaluated
but saved.

I'm not sure. Giving it under discussion :-)

Thanks for the great work :-)

DK


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