problems executing a jquery ajax call within a function

AJAX is asynchronous. This means that the code in the success handler is delayed until the request is successful, while the rest of the code continues as normal. You need to put the relevant code in the AJAX success handler:

getAjax();
function getAjax() {
  $.ajax({
   type: "GET",
   url: 'someURL',
   success: function(response) {
     $(document.body).append('<div>'+response+'</div>');
  });
}

Note that I have also optimised your body selector by using the native Javascript document.body rather than using the standard tag selector.

---

Edit Callback version

function getAjax(callback) {
    $.ajax({
        type: 'GET',
        url: 'someURL',
        success: callback
    });
}

You can now do the code inline using a callback function:

getAjax(function(response) {
    $(document.body).append('<div>'+response+'</div>');
});

or

getAjax(function(response) {
    alert(response);
});

or whatever.

The code inside the anonymous function call will be processed when the AJAX request is complete.

Why don't you return the response to another function in the success callback. This should handle your need for different responses:

getAjax();
function getAjax() {
  $.ajax({
   type: "GET",
   url: 'someURL',
   success: function(response) {
     AppendResponse(response);
  });
}

function AppendResponse(response) {
$('body').append('<div>'+response+'</div>');
}

There are two ways to taggle this. one is to use the success callback:

$.ajax({
   type: "GET",
   url: 'someURL',
   success: function(response) {
     AppendResponse(response);
  });

the other is to set async to false http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.ajax/:

var a;
getAjax();
$('body').append('<div>'+a+'</div>');
function getAjax() {
  $.ajax({
   type: "GET",
   url: 'someURL',
   async: false,
   success: function(response) {
     a = response;
  });
}

Important note on non async:

Cross-domain requests and dataType: "jsonp" requests do not support synchronous operation.

One suggestion I have is to pass a trigger to the command you want to run into the AJAX function so that it will run after AJAX has received a response-

a = getAjax();
function getAjax() {
  $.ajax({
   type: "GET",
   url: 'someURL',
   success: function(response) {
     inputText(response);
  });
}

inputText(someText) {
$(document.body).append('<div>'+ someText +'</div>');
}

That way you can create if statements / other alternatives to continue to use the same AJAX command for different results