Promises with fs and bluebird

Question

I'm currently learning how to use promises in nodejs

so my first challenge was to list files in a directory and then get the content of each with both steps using asynchronous functions. I came up with the following solution but have a strong feeling that this is not the most elegant way to do this, especially the first part where I am "turning" the asynchronous methods into promises

// purpose is to get the contents of all files in a directory
// using the asynchronous methods fs.readdir() and fs.readFile()
// and chaining them via Promises using the bluebird promise library [1]
// [1] https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird 

var Promise = require("bluebird");
var fs = require("fs");
var directory = "templates"

// turn fs.readdir() into a Promise
var getFiles = function(name) {
    var promise = Promise.pending();

    fs.readdir(directory, function(err, list) {
        promise.fulfill(list)
    })

    return promise.promise;
}

// turn fs.readFile() into a Promise
var getContents = function(filename) {
    var promise = Promise.pending();

    fs.readFile(directory + "/" + filename, "utf8", function(err, content) {
        promise.fulfill(content)
    })

    return promise.promise
}

Now chain both promises:

getFiles()    // returns Promise for directory listing 
.then(function(list) {
    console.log("We got " + list)
    console.log("Now reading those files\n")

    // took me a while until i figured this out:
    var listOfPromises = list.map(getContents)
    return Promise.all(listOfPromises)

})
.then(function(content) {
    console.log("so this is what we got: ", content)
})

As I wrote above, it returns the desired result, but I'm pretty sure there is a more elegant way to this.

Answer 1

The code can be made shorter by using generic promisification and the .map method:

var Promise = require("bluebird");
var fs = Promise.promisifyAll(require("fs")); //This is most convenient way if it works for you
var directory = "templates";

var getFiles = function () {
    return fs.readdirAsync(directory);
};
var getContent = function (filename) {
    return fs.readFileAsync(directory + "/" + filename, "utf8");
};

getFiles().map(function (filename) {
    return getContent(filename);
}).then(function (content) {
    console.log("so this is what we got: ", content)
});

In fact you could trim this even further since the functions are not pulling their weight anymore:

var Promise = require("bluebird");
var fs = Promise.promisifyAll(require("fs")); //This is most convenient way if it works for you
var directory = "templates";

fs.readdirAsync(directory).map(function (filename) {
    return fs.readFileAsync(directory + "/" + filename, "utf8");
}).then(function (content) {
    console.log("so this is what we got: ", content)
});

.map should be your bread and butter method when working with collections - it is really powerful as it works for anything from a promise for an array of promises that maps to further promises to any mix of direct values in-between.