I was wondering if someone could help me out with the following.

I'm developing a webshop CMS in which you can create categories. By using jquery's ajax method I'm making a POST request to a PHP script which then handles all the data supplied to it. This works good and all except for the fact that after the query is being executed my HTML doesn't get updated, at least not as well as I want it to.

I understand that the common way of working here is to update HTML in the success callback of the ajax method. But the thing is that every category is being displayed as a list item with an id attribute, this id corresponds to the id the category has in the database. If $.ajax tells me that everything went down smoothly and my query has been executed then there's still no way for me to know which id this new category has been given so that I can update the HTML accordingly.

What would be a "smart" way to tackle this? The first thing that comes to my mind is simply calling another script which figures out the last inserted id on the db but that would mean doing an ajax request in the callback of another ajax request? That doesn't sound right to me...

I can't let the original PHP script return it, because that script already returns error warnings (if any)

Anyone? :)