Considering committing Clever with jQuery XHR code

A code snippet

    if ( protecting_namespaces.data.hasOwnProperty( 'xhr' ) ) { 
        submission.data.xhr.abort() ; 
        }
    protecting_namespaces.data.xhr = $.ajax({
        url: url ,
        data: object ,
        method: 'POST',
        dataType: 'json'
        }) ;

Seems that Syntax Highlighter is happy with JavaScript. OK.

I'm using jQuery's .ajax() interface, and what this does is, should the function that does this get called again, aborts an unfinished AJAX call. This is wonderful when this will be called from one place, but it sucks if you call it from several places to do a few different things.

And, by wonderful, I mean useful for the UX. If you tell the web server to do a thing, you cannot go back and say "No, I didn't mean it." You can tell it "Do something else to get us back to the first state", but you cannot stop it once it has started, unless you're logged into the server and can kill -9.

So, I am considering making xhr into an object, based on a unique identifier for what's actually being done, which should give me protecting_namespaces.data.xhr[id], so I could have several XHR tasks going on in parallel.

Trying to Read MongoDB dump files using BSON

I've been looking at increasing the amount of MongoDB we use at work, and this includes backing up the data. Due to my own confusion, I had a little issue getting mongodump to work, but I have been able to dump from one Mongo database and restore to another.

mongodump writes in a format called Binary JSON, or BSON. I installed BSON.pm with the intention of reading the BSON file and ensuring it works. with small tests, I was able to put objects into BSON, write to file, read from file, and use Data::Dumper to display the object is what I wanted it to be.

But, I find I cannot read the file, because BSON.pm reports it as having an incorrect length.

I fully expect that I'm doing something subtly stupid, but what it could be isn't immediately obvious. the contents of $bson should be exactly as written to file, and mongorestore was happy with it. encode() and decode() had worked acceptably, but admittedly on a much smaller dataset than the one I'm working with here, which contains several months of status updates.

I suppose I don't need to read the BSON files, but I do like being able to check the contents of a database before restoring.