changing variable value with onClick

[pagerussell]

hello,

I am building a site where I want all links to partial page reload using xmlhttprequest and innerhtml. I have done this before, butI always had to have a seperate xmlhttprequest function for each link. So this time I am trying to write just one function, and have the onClick change which document the request is getting. It is not working and I appear to novice to figure out why. Here is the code, i have bolded some relevant lines:

<script type="text/javascript">

function ChangeContent()
{
var whichPHP;
var xmlhttp;
if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
{// code for IE7+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari
xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
}
else
{// code for IE6, IE5
xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
}
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function()
{
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==200)
{
document.getElementById('maincontentbox').innerHTML=xmlhttp.responseText;
}
}
xmlhttp.open("GET",whichPHP+".php",true);
xmlhttp.send();
}
</script>

<a href="javascript: ChangeContent()" onclick="whichPHP='contact_us'"><div id="contact_button" class="main_nav">Contact Us</div></a>

am I making a syntax error somewhere, or just screwing the whole thing up altogether?

The website is www.andymacislove.org if that helps at all.

thanks, page

Also, if I use the innerhtml function to write another of these hrefs, will that link be able to access the function if it is in the header, or should I put the entire function in a .js file on the server? The point of all this would be that the entire page never reloads and all the text content is swapped out on demand.

[niranga]

Try to change your hyperlinks as following

<a href="#" onclick="ChangeContent('contact_us')">
  <div id="contact_button" class="main_nav">Contact Us</div>
</a>

Then change the ChangeContent method as

function ChangeContent(pageName)

After that assign the parameter pageName to whichPHP or use pageName in xmlhttp.open

var whichPHP = pageName

[pagerussell]

That works, thanks for helping a noob out!

[niranga]

Welcome :) :)