I've got an HTML page that needs to make requests to a CAS-protected (Central Authentication Service) web service using the jQuery AJAX functions. I've got the following code:

$.ajax({
    type: "GET",
    url: request,
    dataType: "json",
    complete: function(xmlHttp) {
        console.log(xmlHttp);
        alert(xmlHttp.status);
    },
    success: handleRedirects
});

The request variable can be either to the CAS server (https://cas.mydomain.com/login?service=myServiceURL) or directly to the service (which should then redirect back to CAS to get a service ticket). Firebug shows that the request is being made and that it comes back as a 302 redirect. However, the $.ajax() function isn't handling the redirect.

I wrote this function to work around this:

var handleRedirects = function(data, textStatus) {
    console.log(data, textStatus);
    if (data.redirect) {
       console.log("Calling a redirect: " + data.redirect);
       $.get(data.redirect, handleRedirects);
    } else {
        //function that handles the actual data processing
        gotResponse(data);
    }
};

However, even with this, the handleRedirects function never gets called, and the xmlHttp.status always returns 0. It also doesn't look like the cookies are getting sent with the cas.mydomain.com call. (See this question for a similar problem.)

Is this a problem with the AJAX calls not handling redirects, or is there more going on here than meets the eye?