Node - Wait for loop to finish?

Question

When the function below finishes and provides a finalized list of items in the array 'albums', I want it to call another function/do something else with the list.

Currently it posts [] before the function finishes and I know that's because of asynchronous execution, but I thought Node read linearly since it's single threaded?

function getAlbumsTotal(list, params){
    for(var i = 0; i<list.length; i++){
        api.getArtistAlbums(list[i], params).then(function(data) {
            for(var alb = 0; alb<data.body.items.length; alb++){
                albums.push(data.body.items[alb].id);
            }
        }, function(err) {
            console.error(err);
        });
    }
    console.log(albums);
    //do something with the finalized list of albums here
}

Answer 1

The callback function you provide to then is indeed executed asynchronously, which means it is only executed after the rest of the code in the current call stack has finished executing, including your final console.log.

Here is how you could do it:

function getAlbumsTotal(list, params){
    var promises = list.map(function (item) { // return array of promises
        // return the promise:
        return api.getArtistAlbums(item, params)
            .then(function(data) {
                for(var alb = 0; alb<data.body.items.length; alb++){
                    albums.push(data.body.items[alb].id);
                }
            }, function(err) {
                console.error(err);
            });
    });
    Promise.all(promises).then(function () {
        console.log(albums);
        //do something with the finalized list of albums here
    });
}

NB: Apparently albums is defined as a global variable. This is not so good a design. It would be better that each promise would provide its own subset of albums, and the Promise.all call would be used to concatenate those results into a local variable. Here is how that would look like:

function getAlbumsTotal(list, params){
    var promises = list.map(function (item) { // return array of promises
        // return the promise:
        return api.getArtistAlbums(item, params)
            .then(function(data) {
                // return the array of album IDs:
                return Array.from(data.body.items, function (alb) {
                    return alb.id;
                });
            }, function(err) {
                console.error(err);
            });
    });
    Promise.all(promises).then(function (albums) { // albums is 2D array
        albums = [].concat.apply([], albums); // flatten the array
        console.log(albums);
        //do something with the finalized list of albums here
    });
}

Answer 2

If you want to use data returned from a loop in node.js you have to add a little extra code to check if you're on the last iteration of the loop. Basically you're writing your own "loop complete" check and running only when that condition is true.

I went ahead and wrote a complete, runnable example so you can break it down to see how it works. The important part is to add a counter, increment it after each loop, then check for when the counter is the same length of the list that you're iterating over.

function getArtistAlbums(artist, params){
  var artistAlbums = {
    'Aphex Twin':['Syro', 'Drukqs'],
    'Metallica':['Kill \'Em All', 'Reload']
  };
  return new Promise(function (fulfill, reject){
    fulfill(artistAlbums[artist]);
  });

}
function getAlbumsTotal(list, params){
  var listCount = 0;
  for(var i = 0; i<list.length; i++){
    getArtistAlbums(list[i], params)
      .then(function(data) {
        listCount++;
        for(var alb = 0; alb<data.length; alb++){
        //for(var alb = 0; alb<data.items.length; alb++){
          //albums.push(data.body.items[alb].id);
          albums.push(data[alb]);
        }
        // print out album list at the end of our loop
        if(listCount == list.length){
          console.log(albums);
        }

      }, function(err) {
        console.error(err);
      });
  }
  // prints out too early because of async nature of node.js
  //console.log(albums);
}

var listOfArtists = ['Aphex Twin', 'Metallica'];
var albums = [];

getAlbumsTotal(listOfArtists, 'dummy params');