I know there are quite a few questions floating on this but I'm still not sure what to do.

I have a HTML form called "CuisineForm", after the user selects the type of cuisine, the AJAX sends the form to the server. The AJAX call works fine, and server responds with a JSON responsewhich contains all the serving times of this particular cuisine. These serving times are divided into Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner.

These times need to be populated into 3 separate dropdowns in the same form. but I don't really know how to process the JSON results to populate the 3 dropdowns in the form.

Here is the JSON response from the PHP server side script. Note that this was generated in the PHP script using "echo json_encode()".

{"breakfast":[{"09:00:00":"9:00 am"},{"09:30:00":"9:30 am"}],"lunch":[{"12:00:00":"12:00 pm"},{"12:30:00":"12:30 pm"}],"dinner":[{"19:00:00":"7:00 pm"},{"19:30:00":"7:30 pm"}]}

Here is my $.post code.

$.post( "gettimeslots", $( "#CuisineForm" ).serialize(), function() {
          alert( "success" );
        })
          .done(function(data) {
            // Not sure what code to write here to populate dropdown

          })
          .fail(function() {
            alert( "There was a problem getting the dropdown values!" );
          })
          .always(function() {
            alert( "always" );
        });

Here is my dropdown that I want to populate

<select name="breakfasttimes" id="breakfasttimes"></select>
<select name="lunchtimes" id="lunchtimes"></select>
<select name="dinnertimes" id="dinnertimes"></select>

Most implementations tend to use $.getJSON. But as shown above I am using $.post instead. Please tell me if I should use $.getJSON instead.

Can someone offer some pointers or code advice?

Thanks Kevin

Heres a fiddle that contains the full answer

HTML:

<select name="breakfast" id="breakfast"></select>
<select name="lunch" id="lunch"></select>
<select name="dinner" id="dinner"></select>

JS:

var data = {"breakfast":[{"09:00:00":"9:00 am"},{"09:30:00":"9:30 am"}],"lunch":        [{"12:00:00":"12:00 pm"},{"12:30:00":"12:30 pm"}],"dinner":[{"19:00:00":"7:00 pm"},{"19:30:00":"7:30 pm"}]};

// Put this code inside of the "done callback"
var $elements = $('#breakfast, #lunch, #dinner');
$.each(data, function (dataKey, dataVal) {
    $elements.each(function(domElKey, domElVal){
        if (dataKey === domElVal.id) {
            $.each(dataVal, function(timeKey,timeVal){
                $.each(timeVal,function(timePropKey, timePropVal){
                $(domElVal).append("<option>"+timePropVal+"</option>");
                });
            })
       }
    });
});

A fiddle that contains the answer

Manwal

You could use the $.each() function to loop through the data:

.done(function(data) {
$.each(data, function(index, element) {
            $('body').append($('<div>', {
                text: element.name
            }));
        });

})

Assuming your server side script doesn't set the proper Content-Type: application/json response header you will need to indicate to jQuery that this is JSON by using the dataType: 'json' parameter.