Return errors from PHP run via. AJAX?

Question

Is there a way to get PHP to return an AJAX error code if the PHP script fails somewhere? I was following a tutorial and typed this in to my PHP:

$return['error'] = true;
$return['msg'] = "Could not connect to DB";

And all was well, until I realised it was JSON data. Is there a way to return errors using standard $_POST and returned HTML data (as in, trigger jQuery's AJAX error: event?

Answer 1

I don't know about jQuery, but if it distinguishes between successful and unsuccessful (HTTP 200 OK vs. HTTP != 200) Ajax requests, you might want your PHP script respond with an HTTP code not equal to 200:

if ($everything_is_ok)
    {
        header('Content-Type: application/json');
        print json_encode($result);
    }
else
    {
        header('HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Booboo');
        header('Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8');
        die(json_encode(array('message' => 'ERROR', 'code' => 1337)));
    }