Codeology

With Ext if you do not specify the HTTP request type then it will attempt to make this decision for you, the Ext documentation says that if the request has no parameters it will use GET otherwise it will use POST. When you’re starting out this is fine but later on you will soon find you want to change this, especially in relation to optimization, POST is a more expensive version than GET and GET is cachable.

You can easily adapt a standard Ext.Ajax request by specifying the request method like this:

Ext.Ajax.request({
	method: "GET",
	url: "http://www.example.com/",
	...
});

Simple. The above code is nice for plain AJAX requests however for Ext.data.Store requests things are a little trickier, for that you need to specify a new proxy in the config for the store to use:

var store: new Ext.data.Store({
	autoLoad: false,
	proxy: new Ext.data.HttpProxy({
		method: "GET",
		url: "http://www.example.com/timezones.php"
	}),
	reader: new Ext.data.JsonReader(
		{root: "list", totalProperty: "count"},
		[{name: "timezone_id", type: "int"},{name: "timezone_name", type: "string"}]
	)
});

Wouldn’t the store request using GET anyhow you ask? Yes it would. However, here comes the crunch, what if you added params? This is especially so when using for example the paging toolbar which passes it’s information as such.

Hopefully this will help you in your quest to write better web applications.

Note: There is a slight caveat to using GET over POST and that is because GET makes all the params part of the URL so anything that restricts URL length will not like obscenely long lists of params. In the naming and shaming game I single IE out here.