Prevent return until condition is met

Question

I know these types of question come up fairly often, but I need help with a wait-like mechanism in JavaScript. I know setTimeout-based solutions are going to come up, but I'm not sure how to pull it off in my case.

I'm writing an API that uses a WebSocket internally. There's a connect() method that sets up the WebSocket, and I need to make it not return until after the WebSocket is set up. I'd like it to return a value for whether or not the connection was successful, but that's not the main problem.

The issue I'm hitting is that after a user calls connect(), they may call another method that relies on the WebSocket to be properly set up. If it's called too early, an error is thrown stating that the object is not usable.

My current solution is setting a "connected" flag when I've determined a successful connection and in each method checking for it in each method. If it's not connected, I add the method call to a queue that is ran through by the same code that sets the flag. This works, but it introduces that style of code all over my methods and also seems misleading from the user-perspective, since the call of those functions is deferred. Also, if there is other user code that relies on those calls being completed before it gets to them, it won't behave as expected.

I've been racking my brain with how to handle this case. The easiest solution is to just find a way to block returning from connect until after the WebSocket is set up, but that's not really the JavaScript way. The other option was to make them provide the rest of their code in a callback, but that seems like a weird thing to do in this case. Maybe I'm over-thinking it?

Edit: To better illustrate my problem, here's a example of what the user could do:

var client = new Client(options);
client.connect();
client.getServerStatus();

The getServerStatus() method would be using the WebSocket internally. If the WebSocket is not set up yet, the user will get that not usable error.

Answer 1

Todays Javascript does not really work like that unfortunately. In the future (ECMA6) there may be new language features that address this issue more directly. However for now you are stuck with the currently accepted method of handling asynchronous events, which is limited to callbacks. You may also want to explore 'promises' to handle 'callback hell' however you will need a library for this.

And yes it does seem strange to have callbacks everywhere, especially for someone new to web programming, however it is really the only way to go about it at this stage (assuming you want a cross-browser friendly solution).

Answer 2

"Wait" is almost the keyword you are looking for. Actually, it's yield that does this. See eg MDN's documentation .

Answer 3

There's a connect() method that sets up the WebSocket, and I need to make it not return until after the WebSocket is set up

That isn't going to happen unless you rewrite the javascript execution engine.

Either the code trying to send data will need to check the socket state (I'd go with encapsulating the socket in a object, supplying a method which sets a member variable on the open/close events and poll the state of that member variable from the external code). Alternatively you could add messages and call backs to a queue and process the queue when the socket connects.