Tornado coroutine

Question

I am trying to learn tornado coroutines, but I have error using below code.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\projekty\tornado\env\lib\site-packages\tornado\web.py", line 1334, in _execute
    result = yield result
  File "D:\projekty\tornado\env\lib\site-packages\tornado\gen.py", line 628, in run
    value = future.result()
  File "D:\projekty\tornado\env\lib\site-packages\tornado\concurrent.py", line 109, in result
    raise_exc_info(self._exc_info)
  File "D:\projekty\tornado\env\lib\site-packages\tornado\gen.py", line 631, in run
    yielded = self.gen.throw(*sys.exc_info())
  File "index.py", line 20, in get
    x = yield 'test'
  File "D:\projekty\tornado\env\lib\site-packages\tornado\gen.py", line 628, in run
    value = future.result()
  File "D:\projekty\tornado\env\lib\site-packages\tornado\concurrent.py", line 111, in result
    raise self._exception
BadYieldError: yielded unknown object 'test'

Code:

from tornado.ioloop import IOLoop
from tornado.web import RequestHandler, Application, url
from tornado import gen

class HelloHandler(RequestHandler):
    @gen.coroutine
    def get(self):
        x = yield 'test'
        self.render('hello.html')


def make_app():
    return Application(
        [url(r"/", HelloHandler)], 
        debug = True
    )

def main():
    app = make_app()
    app.listen(8888)
    IOLoop.instance().start()

main()

Answer 1

As Lutz Horn pointed out, the tornado.coroutine decorator requires that you yield only Future objects or certain containers containing Future objects. So trying to yield a str will raise an error. I think the piece you're missing is that any place inside of a coroutine where you want to call yield something() , something must either also be a coroutine, or return a Future . For example, you could fix your example like this:

from tornado.gen import Return

class HelloHandler(RequestHandler):
    @gen.coroutine
    def get(self):
        x = yield self.do_test()
        self.render('hello.html')

    @gen.coroutine
    def do_test(self):
        raise Return('test')
        # return 'test' # Python 3.3+

Or even this (though generally you shouldn't do it this way):

class HelloHandler(RequestHandler):
    @gen.coroutine
    def get(self):
        x = yield self.do_test()
        self.render('hello.html')

    def do_test(self):
        fut = Future()
        fut.set_result("test")
        return fut

Of course, these are contrived examples; since we're not actually doing anything asynchronous in do_test , there's no reason to make it a coroutine. Normally you'd be doing some kind of asynchronous I/O in there. For example:

class HelloHandler(RequestHandler):
    @gen.coroutine
    def get(self):
        x = yield self.do_test()
        self.render('hello.html')

    @gen.coroutine
    def do_test(self):
        http_client = AsyncHTTPClient()
        out = yield http_client.fetch("someurl.com") # fetch is a coroutine
        raise Return(out.body)
        # return out.body # Python 3.3+

Answer 2

From the documentation :

Most asynchronous functions in Tornado return a Future ; yielding this object returns its result.

You can also yield a list or dict of Futures , which will be started at the same time and run in parallel; a list or dict of results will be returned when they are all finished:

The string "test" is not a Future . Try to yield one.