Getting extra data from server along with POST request

So I've got some pagination working, but there's a variable I need access to (total pages). When I get the data to display in the table from changing the page (or otherwise updating the table), what's a good开发者_如何学Python way to get the variable in the same request?

If your data is being transfered in some well defined form like XML or JSON, you can simply add an extra parameter to your output. $.post can be configured to decode the server's response as XML or JSON via the last parameter.

Using JSON, your client code might look something like this:

// Request page 3 from the server
$.post(url, {page:3}, function(data, textStatus, XMLHttpRequest) {
   // data.page contains the HTML for page 3
   // data.num_pages contains the number of pages
}, 'json');

And (assuming PHP on the server-side) you'd output your JSON data thusly:

<?php
  // instead of dumping the HTML for page 3 directly to the browser,
  // send it as part of a JSON-encoded response
  $page = '<div class="page">Page 3 of 10</div>';

  echo json_encode(array(
    'page' => $page,
    'num_pages' => 37, // substitute with your calculated number of pages
  ));
?>