newbie: xmlhttprequest writes?

[barrie richard]

hi all, sorry if this is very obvious.

I'm playing around with dhtml/javascript before a jsp project to get the feel of things.

using the built-in apache web server on my mac:

I have a very simple form that when loaded, reads some data from a xml file via xmlhttprequest and displays it - this works ok.

What i would like to do is take a piece of info the user has entered into a form field and _save_ it to a _new_ xml file.

I thought i could do something like this.

    try {
        var client = new XMLHttpRequest();
        client.open("POST", "somefile.txt", false);
        // i want the file dumped into the same location as the code - for now.
        client.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "text/plain;charset=UTF-8");
        client.send(message); // data i want in the file
        alert(client.responseText);
    } 
    catch (e) {
        alert(e.message);
    }

but this doesn't work. if the file exists the alert returns nothing and nothing is added to the file. if the file does not exist (which is what i would want, i get failure code 0x800004005).

Presumably i'm doing something fundamentally wrong here but am not sure what way i should do it.

Any thoughts?

TIA.

bg

[Ulf Dittmer]

An XML file is a passive entity - it can be read, but it can't be written to from a browser. You need an active server-side component (like a servlet) that you can POST to with the new file contents and which then uses file I/O to alter the file.