Ajax.Updater doesn't work when asynchronous = false

I had the same problem but I did two Ajax.updaters back to back. First one asynchronous:true and the next one asynchronous:false. Everything else was the same. Not sure why this worked, but it did what I wanted synchronously. I also tried it the other way around false then true but this didn't work. Maybe this will help for now.

I use following hack for this:

var updater = new Ajax.Updater(
  'person', '/people/edit/15',
  {asynchronous: false, evalScripts: true}
);

updater.updateContent();

I made the following modification to get synchronous calls to work in prototype. The code begins at line 647. The problem is that when the asynch flag is false, the onreadystatechange event does not fire. So, simply call the respondToReadyState event yourself after sending the request.

if (this.options.asynchronous) {
   this.transport.onreadystatechange = this.onStateChange.bind(this);
   setTimeout((function() {this.respondToReadyState(1)}).bind(this), 
} 

this.setRequestHeaders();

var body = this.options.postBody ? this.options.postBody : parameters;
this.transport.send(this.options.method == 'post' ? body : null);
/// BEGIN: FIX TO MAKE SYNCHRONOUS CALLS TO WORK
if (!this.options.asynchronous) {
   this.respondToReadyState(this.transport.readyState);
}
/// END: FIX TO MAKE SYNCHRONOUS CALLS TO WORK

The problem here appears to be in the initialize method of Ajax.Updater where the containers property performs a $() on the container argument. Here's the relevant code corrected (this is the first block of code in the initialize method):

    this.containers = {                                                                                  
      success: container.success ? container.success : container,
      failure: container.failure ? container.failure :                                                  
        (container.success ? null : container)                                                            
    };

The problem with calling $() in the initialize method is that the Element.update method (which is called in the Ajax.Updater.updateContent method by default) already performs the $() itself. Why this breaks isn't apparent but the code above appears to fix the fault.

This should now work, judging by the recent framework code. If not, take a look at #6366