When working with async functions or observables provided by 3rd party libraries, for example Cloud firestore, I've found functions the waitFor
method shown below (TypeScript, but you get the idea...) to be helpful when you need to wait on some process to complete, but you don't want to have to embed callbacks within callbacks within callbacks nor risk an infinite loop.
This method is sort of similar to a while (!condition)
sleep loop, but
yields asynchronously and performs a test on the completion condition at regular intervals till true or timeout.
export const sleep = (ms: number) => {
return new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, ms))
}
export const waitFor = async function (interval: number, timeout: number,
booleanFunction: Function): Promise<boolean> {
let elapsed = 1;
if (booleanFunction()) return true;
while (elapsed < timeout) {
elapsed += interval;
await sleep(interval);
if (booleanFunction()) {
return true;
}
}
return false;
}
The say you have a long running process on your backend you want to complete before some other task is undertaken. For example if you have a function that totals a list of accounts, but you want to refresh the accounts from the backend before you calculate, you can do something like this:
async recalcAccountTotals() : number {
this.accountService.refresh();
if (this.accounts.dirty) {
let updateResult = await waitFor(100,2000,()=> {return !(this.accounts.dirty)})
}
if(!updateResult) {
console.error("Account refresh timed out, recalc aborted");
return NaN;
}
return ...
}