Accurate long polling example?

Question

I've made an function that should do an long polling and fetch live data that is being "pushed" to me. Right now I'm testing against an json object that is formatted in the way that it will look once I receive the data. It seems as it is working accurate so far. I was merely wondering what you think about it? Would you refactor it somehow or do it entirely in another way?

var url = '../../path_to_script/respondents.json';

function fetchData() {
  $.ajax({
    url: url,
    method: 'GET',
    dataType: 'json',
    contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
    cache: false,
    success: function (data) {
        //parseData(data);
        setTimeout(function () { fetchData() }, 5000);
        console.log(data);
    },
    error: function (data) {
        setTimeout(function () { fetchData() }, 5000)
    }

 });

}

Regards

Answer 1

I would do some changes

• Change method to type, method isn't a valid parameter for $.ajax. This is an error
• Remove contentType, with dataType: 'json' is enough to have those values
• Do something when there's an error. Use the error parameters if you need them. For example:

.

error: function (xhr, status, errorThrown) {
  alert("There was an error processing your request.\nPlease try again.\nStatus: " + status);
}

Hope this helps. Cheers