Whenever an Ajax request completes, jQuery triggers the ajaxComplete event. Any and all handlers that have been registered with the .ajaxComplete() method are executed at this time.

To observe this method in action, we can set up a basic Ajax load request:

<div class="trigger">Trigger</div>
<div class="result"></div>
<div class="log"></div>

We can attach our event handler to any element:

$('.log').ajaxComplete(function() {
  $(this).text('Triggered ajaxComplete handler.');
});

Now, we can make an Ajax request using any jQuery method:

$('.trigger').click(function() {
  $('.result').load('ajax/test.html');
});

When the user clicks the button and the Ajax request completes, the log message is displayed.

Note: Because .ajaxComplete() is implemented as a method of jQuery object instances, we can use the this keyword as we do here to refer to the selected elements within the callback function.

All ajaxComplete handlers are invoked, regardless of what Ajax request was completed. If we must differentiate between the requests, we can use the parameters passed to the handler. Each time an ajaxComplete handler is executed, it is passed the event object, the XMLHttpRequest object, and the settings object that was used in the creation of the request. For example, we can restrict our callback to only handling events dealing with a particular URL:

Note: You can get the returned ajax contents by looking at xhr.responseXML or xhr.responseHTML for xml and html respectively.

$('.log').ajaxComplete(function(e, xhr, settings) {
  if (settings.url == 'ajax/test.html') {
    $(this).text('Triggered ajaxComplete handler. The result is ' +
                     xhr.responseHTML);
  }
});