php return true OR echo OR HttpResponse::send()?

[liliya woland]

Hi all,
I'm new to php. I have an .html page with an ajax call to php. I can reach the script, and it gets executed. The problem is I have no idea how to pass a value back into my .html page, the response to my ajax call. I have a basic php book that has nothing for it.
Do I need to have a method to have a return statement?
Ideally, I'd use HttpResponse::send(), but I can not get it to work - 500 error.

Please help, I'm lost! In all, I tested with:

return true
return "true"
echo true
echo "true"

HttpResponse::setCache(true);
HttpResponse::setContentType('text/html');      
HttpResponse::setData("true");
HttpResponse::send();

Here is what my script looks like:

<?php
    $ToEmail = '[e-mail]';
    $EmailSubject = 'Sign up!';
    $mailheader = "From: SignUp\r\n";
    $mailheader .= "Reply-To: ".$_POST["signup_email"]."\r\n";
    $mailheader .= "Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1";
    $MESSAGE_BODY = "<b>New User Information:</b><br/>";
    $MESSAGE_BODY .= "First Name: ".$_POST["signup_fname"]."<br/>";
    $MESSAGE_BODY .= "Last Name: ".$_POST["signup_lname"]."<br/>";
    $MESSAGE_BODY .= "Email Address: ".$_POST["signup_email"]."<br/>";
    $MESSAGE_BODY .= "Company: ".nl2br($_POST["signup_company"])."<br/>";
    $MESSAGE_BODY .= "Facebook Page URL: ".nl2br($_POST["signup_fburl"])."<br/>";
    mail($ToEmail, $EmailSubject, $MESSAGE_BODY, $mailheader); 
	
	## errors using HttpResponse
	#HttpResponse::setCache(true);
	#HttpResponse::setContentType('text/html');      
	#HttpResponse::setData("true");
	#HttpResponse::send();
	
	## this makes no return
	echo true;
	return true;		
?>

[K. Tsang]

Not sure where its your HttpResponse not returning or not working as it should but have you try using the old traditional AJAX approach using JavaScript getXmlHttpObject() stuff?

By the way, if your PHP script simply do send email, why not just return the status from the mail() function. But again currently that status is nowhere.