I have a need to make ajax calls where it would be useful to keep the key/value pair encoding for the querystring, but also allow for a body to be passed. For instance I do a put that requires username/password and then an XML body also. For all my other rest calls I just pass the key/value pairs and let the $.ajax call encode them to the querystring. But since this call also needs data I have to build the string myself onto the url, turn off data processing and pass the xml as the data. Why not just have two data parameters? One to build the querystring and one for any actual data to send.