How do I wait for a promise to finish before returning the variable of a function?

Question

I\'m still struggling with promises, but making some progress thanks to the community here.

I have a simple JS function which queries a Parse database. It\'s suppose

Answer 1

Instead of returning a resultsArray you return a promise for a results array and then then that on the call site - this has the added benefit of the caller knowing the function is performing asynchronous I/O. Coding concurrency in JavaScript is based on that - you might want to read this question to get a broader idea:

function resultsByName(name)
{   
    var Card = Parse.Object.extend("Card");
    var query = new Parse.Query(Card);
    query.equalTo("name", name.toString());

    var resultsArray = [];

    return query.find({});                           

}

// later
resultsByName("Some Name").then(function(results){
    // access results here by chaining to the returned promise
});

You can see more examples of using parse promises with queries in Parse's own blog post about it.