How to call custom asnyc code to initialize a Node.io Job once (before successive calls to input())?

Question

Just discovered Node.io, gone though the docs, api, etc. and it looks great. However, building my first job exports.job = new nodeio.Job(..), with methods like input, run,output, reduce, complete I'm in need of some kind of initialize() method which is called once, before successive calls to input() are done. (Similar how complete is called once just before the job is finished)

Any such method around?

For completeness: This code imho has to be part of the node.io flow (through some dedicated method) since initializing my async code outside of the node.io scope doesn't guarentee the data is already there before the node.io job is executed.

Answer 1

I don't know if there is such a method, have you browsed through the source? It looks like there is an 'init' method that is called by the processor if it is on the job. If you try that and it isn't what you're looking for, you could suggest this as a feature on the node.io github site.

Otherwise, this would be a very simple thing to add for yourself. Just add an 'initialize' method to your object, and then put the following lines at the top of your 'input' or 'run' method (which I think would probably work better if you need the data to be ready already):

if (!this.initialized) {
   this.initialized = true;
   this.initialize();
}

Note that there is a tiny performance hit here, of course. But in most cases, it's only the amount of time it takes to check the value of one variable, which is probably quite minimal compared to the amount of processing you actually need.