Outer variables not being altered inside Promise.then function

Question

On node while using thinky.js, I am trying to iterate through a loop and add each item to an array. This however, for some reason is not working.

In another place, it is indentical and working, just without a Promise.then function. Why is this not working?

var fixedItems = [];
for (i in tradeItems) {
  var item = tradeItems[i];
  Item.get(item["id"]).run().then(function(result) {
    var f = { "assetid": result["asset_id"] };
    console.log(f);  // WOrks
    fixedItems.push(f); // Doesn't work
  });
}

console.log(fixedItems); // Nothing

Answer 1

Your problem is that you are calling console.log(fixedItems) before any of the promises in the loop have finished executing. A better way of doing this that would also solve the asynchronous problem is to put all the item IDs in an array first and retrieve all the items in a single query, which is also more efficient on the database side.

var itemIds = tradeItems.map(function(item) {
    return item.id;
});

var fixedItems = [];

//you would need to write your own getItemsById() function or put the code
//to get the items here
getItemsById(itemIds).then(function(items) {

    items.forEach(function(item) {
        var f = { "assetid": result["asset_id"] };
        fixedItems.push(f);
    });

    whenDone();
});

function whenDone() {
    //you should be able to access fixedItems here
}

I couldn't easily find how to look up multiple records by ID in a single query with thinky, but I did find this page which might help: http://c2journal.com/2013/01/17/rethinkdb-filtering-for-multiple-ids/

While this would be my preferred way of solving this problem, it would also be possible to still use multiple queries and use a promise chain to wait for them all to be resolved before continuing to your subsequent code. If you wanted to go that route, check out this link: http://promise-nuggets.github.io/articles/11-doing-things-in-parallel.html. (Note: I haven't personally used Bluebird, but I think the Bluebird example in that link may be out of date. The map method appears to be the current recommended way to do this with promises: https://stackoverflow.com/a/28167340/560114.)

Update: Or for this latter option, you can just use the code in joews's answer above.

Answer 2

A Promise represents the future result of a task. In this case you're logging fixedItems before your tasks (the calls to Item.get) have finished working. In other words, the then functions haven't run yet so nothing has been put into fixedItems.

If you want use fixedItems once it contains all of the items, you'll need to wait for all of the promises to resolve.

How you do that depends on the Promise library you're using. This example, with Promise.all, works with many libraries including native ES6 Promises:

// Get an array of Promises, one per item to fetch.
// The Item.get calls start running in parallel immediately.
var promises = Object.keys(tradeItems).map(function(key) {
  var tradeItem = tradeItems[key];
  return Item.get(tradeItem.id);
});

// Wait for all of the promises to resolve. When they do,
//  work on all of the resolved values together.
Promise.all(promises)
  .then(function(results) {
    // At this point all of your promises have resolved.
    // results is an array of all of the resolved values.

    // Create your fixed items and return to make them available
    //  to future Promises in this chain
    return results.map(function(result) {
      return { assetid: result.asset_id }
    });
  })
  .then(function(fixedItems) {
    // In this example, all we want to do is log them
    console.log(fixedItems);
  });

Recommended reading: the HTML5 rocks intro to Promises.