Promises in node.js: nesting promise patterns

Join me for a little exploration in some patterns that can be used with promises, we will mainly play around with different ways to pass data through promise chains and how to get what you want out of the other end.

Here we are loading the user information, then passing the id from that object to another two promises. The reason the two on the inside are nested is that they both need access to the user object. This also leads to another potential problem because the inner promises are executed sequentially, and in our case, they don't need to be.

This solves the problem in a pretty neat way, we wrap the two inner calls together in a Promise.all() to get them to execute in parallel. Notice how we take advantage of array destructuring to pass in the results together, this is a very useful little pattern.

There may be a specific requirement for this to be changed into an object rather than an unwrapped array, in this case maybe you could wrap both calls in a method with a .then() map.

It's up to you really where the different conversions and abstractions go, I'd advise being careful of having lots of little functions to wrap things up as it leads to code being hard to follow.

But what if we want to merge all of the data together into a single object, you can, of course, do this by nesting all the promises into one inner promise to share the data, but what if we are trying to avoid doing that?

In this case, we change all of the functions to take and return a context object that is updated by each function, this can seem a desirable way to do things but I would recommend against it. Firstly now every method isn't really a pure loading method its kind of a loadUserMessagesAndUpdateContext() method, while if you use this pattern lots I'm sure people wouldn't be too confused unless they hit issues with the way this is going to execute. If you look at my examples they will update the context object before they resolve. Most of the time this probably won't be a problem, but it could definatly give someone a headache.

Join me next time when we look at async/await!