Canceling a Deferred Promise in jQuery

Question

How can I cancel a promise without removing the element from the DOM?

fiddle

I ran this code:

$("#box")
  .delay(2000)
  .show("slow")
  .delay(2000)
  .promise()                            
  .then(function(){log("Done");});

After this, is there a way to cancel the promise? Both clearQueue() and stop(true) didn't work, because it's not an animation that I'm trying to cancel. I saw that remove() should do it ... but I only want to stop the promise, not remove the entire element.

Answer 1

Good news. Since yesterday you can cancel your promise.

I published the new version of my small plugin jquery-timing that provides two methods amongst many others called .wait() and .unwait().

var deferred = $("#box").delay(2000).show("slow").delay(2000).promise();
$.wait(deferred, function(){ log("Done"); });

If you then want to unregister the callback:

$.unwait();

These static versions of wait and unwait also support an optional group name to not cancel any handler but only a specific set.

Besides that you can do a lot more smart stuff like:

$('#box').wait(deferred).addClass('ready');

or the whole code in one chain, without unwait option:

$("#box").delay(2000).show("slow")
  .delay(2000).join(function(){log("Done");})).addClass('ready');

or the same even shorter with option to cancel the two pauses:

$("#box").wait(2000).show("slow",$)
  .wait(2000, function(){log("Done");})).addClass('ready');

Just see the docs, examples, and API what fits best for you.

Answer 2

I believe you can use $('#box').remove();

From the jQuery documentation here: http://api.jquery.com/promise/

The returned Promise is linked to a Deferred object stored on the .data() for an element. Since the .remove() method removes the element's data as well as the element itself, it will prevent any of the element's unresolved Promises from resolving. If it is necessary to remove an element from the DOM before its Promise is resolved, use .detach() instead and follow with .removeData() after resolution."