Call ASP.NET PageMethod/WebMethod with jQuery - returns whole page

Question

jQuery 1.3.2, ASP.NET 2.0. Making an AJAX call to a PageMethod (WebMethod) returns the full/whole page instead of just the response. A breakpoint on the page method shows it's never getting hit. I have the [WebMethod] attribute on my method, and it is public static, returns string and accepts no params. I even tried adding [ScriptService] at the top of my class to see if it helped, but it did not.

I have seen this post Jquery AJAX with ASP.NET WebMethod Returning Entire Page which had my same symptoms, but I am still having a problem. I read http://encosia.com/2008/05/29/using-jquery-to-directly-call-aspnet-ajax-page-methods/ and I feel like I'm following this to the T, but still no luck.

The jQuery call I'm making is:

jQuery.ajax({
    type: 'POST',
    contentType: 'application/json; charset=utf-8',
    data: '{}',
    dataType: 'json',
    url: 'MyPage.aspx/SomePageMethod',
    success: function(result){
        alert(result);
    }
});

The request/response headers, as per Firebug in FF3, are as follows

Response Headers
Server  ASP.NET Development Server/8.0.0.0
Date    Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:58:27 GMT
X-AspNet-Version    2.0.50727
Cache-Control   private
Content-Type    text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length  108558
Connection  Close

Request Headers 
Host    localhost:2624
User-Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6
Accept  application/json, text/javascript, */*
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive  300
Connection  keep-alive
Content-Type    application/json; charset=utf-8
X-Requested-With XMLHttpRequest
Referer http://localhost:2624/MyApp/MyPage.aspx
Content-Length  2
Cookie  ASP.NET_SessionId=g1idhx55b5awyi55fvorj055; 

I've added a ScriptManager to my page just for kicks to see if it helped, but no luck there.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Do you know that Page Methods are working properly? If you use the the ScriptManager do they work?

It sounds like you might be missing a web.config entry. Specifically the HttpModules section.