AJAX

AJAX is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest.

If you select this option, OpenText DAST displays all pages containing an AJAX engine, as well as the AJAX requests.

There are two types of AJAX line items in this view: 

• AJAX Page (as illustrated above)
• Request

If you click an item in the list, OpenText DAST displays "This page uses AJAX in script" (for a Page type) or it lists the query and/or POST data parameters (for a Request type).

How AJAX works

AJAX is not a technology per se, but a combination of existing technologies, including HTML or XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, the Document Object Model, XML, XSLT, and the XMLHttpRequest object. When these technologies are combined in the AJAX model, Web applications are able to make quick, incremental updates to the user interface without reloading the entire browser page.

Instead of loading a Web page at the start of the session, the browser loads an AJAX engine that is responsible for both rendering the user interface and communicating with the server. Every user action that normally would generate an HTTP request takes the form of a JavaScript call to the AJAX engine instead. Any response to a user action that does not require communication with the server (such as simple data validation, editing data in memory, and even some navigation) is handled by the engine. If the engine needs to communicate with the server — submitting data for processing, loading additional interface code, or retrieving new data — the engine makes those requests asynchronously, usually using XML, without stalling a user's interaction with the application.