nusi

… for whatever reason, it’s working now:

I made another (test-)childtheme, activated it instead of my. The test-theme worked as expected. Then I reactivated to my allegedly broken one and – whoops – it worked! Really mysterious… whatever the reason for the failure was, I’ll keep an eye on it and return to this thread if I find out more.

Well, as I wrote earlier I already found out why I didn’t find ‘wp_ajax_my_action’ by grepping through the sources. However, I followed your advice and also tried ‘wp_ajax_nopriv_(my_action)’ which didn’t change anything. Basically I believe ‘wp_ajax_’ is the right hook as the user has to be logged in when opening the page (there’s a check for that at the beginning of my code).

Out of curiosity I added the ‘add_action’ call in both, my custom page and functions.php within my theme. That resulted in an error ‘Cannot redeclare add_post_meta_bs() (previously declared in … /window.php’ which leads me to the assumption that the call basically works ok (of course I can’t redeclare it – it’s php…).

Regarding wp_enqueue_scripts(): If I understand the documentation correctly that’s supposed to be used only for frontend pages. In the backend resp. admin-area one should use admin_enqueue_scripts(). However, I don’t really think that causes a problem here – all of my JavaSripts are basically working as they should besides that AJAX thing (there’s quite a lot of JS functionality on that page which I simply stripped out for the sake of conciseness). Also, I am already on the page into which I’m embedding those JavaScripts – how should wp_enqueue_scripts() or admin_enqueue_scripts() be used here? (once again, it’s a custom page that’s quite a bit different from other admin pages like post.php, edit.php or whatever).

So, I’m still at the point of not getting a response after wp-admin/admin-ajax.php got called. I can see in the console what got sent and jQuery.post().success().error() gives me
Object { readyState=0, status=0, statusText="error"}
but no response like I get e.g. from the autosave-process which also calls wp-admin/admin-ajax.php.

I think I’ll give up if some lucky coincidence doesn’t reveal the real source of my problem. Very possible that I should have done it all differently, rather following the standard wordpress-way of building admin-pages. But I simply don’t have the time for that and my client won’t pay the extra effort. It’s not a big drama.

Thanks again for your patience and attention to my little problem. Maybe I’ll find a solution one day and I’ll be able to help others when going through the same.

Stefan

p.p.s.: I know know why I didn’t find ‘wp_ajax_my_action’ documented: https://codex.ww.wp.xz.cn/Plugin_API/Action_Reference/wp_ajax_(action)

… but maybe there’s something else I’m doing wrong

Thanks for the reply! If I understand correctly what I did wasn’t that wrong. First I tried to execute the ‘add-action’ part from within my custom page (the one within my modal window). However I only did that for the function that was supposed to be executed within wp-admin/admin-ajax.php. The other action, containing the jQuery-JavaScript part (jQuery.post(…)) was just written into the header of my page (I can see on the console that it’s being executed. I didn’t bother much for the ‘ajaxurl’ not being recognized. I just used hardcoded the path to wp-admin/admin-ajax.php).

Also I tried to put the ‘add_action’ call into functions.php within my theme (it’s a thematic-childtheme). However that didn’t have the desired effect either. As a consequence I digged a bit deeper into the docs in order to get a better understanding on how ‘add_action’ basically works. I finally found this page which documents the existing action-hooks. Interesting