jQuery $.wait() for *all* deferred's to be rejected?

Question

jQuery has a nice feature of its Deferred API, $.wait() for working with multiple Deferreds / Promises. It returns when:

• All of the Deferreds have been resolve()d

or

• One of the Deferreds has been reject()ed

Most of the time this is what you want, but sometimes you want to know when all of them have been reject()ed.

Is there a simple or elegant way to do something like $.wait() but only when all Deferreds have been rejected?

(There may be other use cases but mine is to combine this with waiting for the first of several Deferred's to resolve.)

Answer 1

In the spirit of how the Promise specification is likely going for the future with a PromiseInspection object, here's a jQuery add-on function that tells you when all promises are done, whether fulfilled or rejected:

// pass either multiple promises as separate arguments or an array of promises
$.settle = function(p1) {
    var args;
    if (Array.isArray(p1)) {
          args = p1;
    } else {
        args = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments);
    }

    function PromiseInspection(fulfilled, val) {
        return {
            isFulfilled: function() {
                return fulfilled;
            }, value: function() {
                return fulfilled ? val: undefined;
            }, reason: function() {
                return !fulfilled ? val: undefined;
            }
        };
    }
    return $.when.apply($, args.map(function(p) {
        // if incoming value, not a promise, then wrap it in a promise
        if (!p || (!(typeof p === "object" || typeof p === "function")) || typeof p.then !== "function") {
            p = $.Deferred().resolve(p);
        }
        // Now we know for sure that p is a promise
        // Make sure that the returned promise here is always resolved with a PromiseInspection object, never rejected
        return p.then(function(val) {
            return new PromiseInspection(true, val);
        }, function(reason) {
            // convert rejected promise into resolved promise
            // this is required in jQuery 1.x and 2.x (works in jQuery 3.x, but the extra .resolve() is not required in 3.x)
            return $.Deferred().resolve(new PromiseInspection(false, reason));
        });
    })).then(function() {
          // return an array of results which is just more convenient to work with
          // than the separate arguments that $.when() would normally return
        return Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments);
    });
}

Then, you can use it like this:

$.settle(promiseArray).then(function(inspectionArray) {
    inspectionArray.forEach(function(pi) {
        if (pi.isFulfilled()) {
            // pi.value() is the value of the fulfilled promise
        } else {
            // pi.reason() is the reason for the rejection
        }
    });
});

Keep in mind that $.settle() will always fulfill (never reject) and the fulfilled value is an array of PromiseInspection objects and you can interrogate each one to see if it was fulfilled or rejected and then fetch the corresponding value or reason. See the demo below for example usage:

Working demo: https://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/y0gjs31r/