window.fetch polyfill

This fork supports IE8 with es5-shim, es5-sham and es6-promise.

If you also use JSONP, checkout fetch-jsonp.

Fetch API is still very new and not fully supported in some browsers, so you may need to check browser verson as well as if window.fetch exists. In this case, you can set window.__disableNativeFetch = true to use AJAX polyfill always.

The global fetch function is an easier way to make web requests and handle responses than using an XMLHttpRequest. This polyfill is written as closely as possible to the standard Fetch specification at https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org.

Installation

$ npm install fetch-ie8 --save

You'll also need a Promise polyfill for older browsers.

$ npm install es6-promise

Run this to polyfill the global environment at the beginning of your application.

require('es6-promise').polyfill();

(For a node.js implementation, try node-fetch)

Usage

The fetch function supports any HTTP method. We'll focus on GET and POST example requests.

HTML

fetch('/users.html')
  .then(function(response) {
    return response.text()
  }).then(function(body) {
    document.body.innerHTML = body
  })

JSON

fetch('/users.json')
  .then(function(response) {
    return response.json()
  }).then(function(json) {
    console.log('parsed json', json)
  }).catch(function(ex) {
    console.log('parsing failed', ex)
  })

Response metadata

fetch('/users.json').then(function(response) {
  console.log(response.headers.get('Content-Type'))
  console.log(response.headers.get('Date'))
  console.log(response.status)
  console.log(response.statusText)
})

Post form

var form = document.querySelector('form')

fetch('/query', {
  method: 'post',
  body: new FormData(form)
})

Post JSON

fetch('/users', {
  method: 'post',
  headers: {
    'Accept': 'application/json',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    name: 'Hubot',
    login: 'hubot',
  })
})

File upload

var input = document.querySelector('input[type="file"]')

var form = new FormData()
form.append('file', input.files[0])
form.append('user', 'hubot')

fetch('/avatars', {
  method: 'post',
  body: form
})

Success and error handlers

This causes fetch to behave like jQuery's $.ajax by rejecting the Promise on HTTP failure status codes like 404, 500, etc. The response Promise is resolved only on successful, 200 level, status codes.

function status(response) {
  if (response.status >= 200 && response.status < 300) {
    return response
  }
  throw new Error(response.statusText)
}

function json(response) {
  return response.json()
}

fetch('/users')
  .then(status)
  .then(json)
  .then(function(json) {
    console.log('request succeeded with json response', json)
  }).catch(function(error) {
    console.log('request failed', error)
  })

Response URL caveat

The Response object has a URL attribute for the final responded resource. Usually this is the same as the Request url, but in the case of a redirect, its all transparent. Newer versions of XHR include a responseURL attribute that returns this value. But not every browser supports this. The compromise requires setting a special server side header to tell the browser what URL it just requested (yeah, I know browsers).

response.headers['X-Request-URL'] = request.url

If you want response.url to be reliable, you'll want to set this header. The day that you ditch this polyfill and use native fetch only, you can remove the header hack.