Making Mongoose Keep Its Promises on the Server

So far I really like the deferred/promise model. On the client it lets me get data as early as I want to, but defer using the response until it’s convenient; maybe not until inside some event handler. I can also place a call to .fail() for any promise in a convenient place, even before I make a call for data. The Deferred object coordinates calling any registered fail function(s) if anything errors — that’s right, you can specify multiple handlers for the failure — and all the done, then and always functions that have been registered, when appropriate.

To do the same thing on the server, I found jQuery Deffered for nodejs. After requiring it

var Deferred = require( "JQDeferred" );

and with a little function in my application

function promise (query) {
  var dfd = Deferred ();

  query .run (function (err, doc) {
    if (doc) {
      if (doc.length > 0 || Object.keys(doc).length > 0) {
        console .log ("found\n", util .inspect(query));
        dfd .resolve (doc);
      }
      else {
        console .log ("not found or no rows\n", util .inspect(query)); 
        dfd .resolve (null);
      }
    }
    else {
      console .log ("error or no data object\n", util .inspect(query));
      dfd.reject (err ? err : null);
    }
  });
  return dfd .promise ();
}

Works for any Mongoose method that returns a query, like find, findOne. It’ll need to change to fold in the rest of my calls. In one function, I need to get 3 rows to verify something before I take action. Using jQuery Deferred and this promise function, dealing with 3 asynchronous calls with very little code looks like

var CloseAll = function (query, resp) {

  Deferred .when (
    promise (modelA .findOne ({modelAkey:query.body.A})), 
    promise (modelB .findOne ({modelBkey:query.body.B})), 
    promise (modelC .findOne ({modelCkey:query.body.C}))) 
    .fail (function (err)    { resp .send (_.extend (query.body, err), 500); })
    .done (function (dataA, dataB, dataC) {
          now do stuff that require all 3 things

Pretty sweet.