Call An Asynchronous Javascript Function Synchronously

Question

First, this is a very specific case of doing it the wrong way on-purpose to retrofit an asynchronous call into a very synchronous codebase that is many thousands of lines lo

Answer 1

There is one nice workaround at http://taskjs.org/

It uses generators which are new to javascript. So it's currently not implemented by most browsers. I tested it in firefox, and for me it is nice way to wrap asynchronous function.

Here is example code from project GitHub

var { Deferred } = task;

spawn(function() {
    out.innerHTML = "reading...\n";
    try {
        var d = yield read("read.html");
        alert(d.responseText.length);
    } catch (e) {
        e.stack.split(/\n/).forEach(function(line) { console.log(line) });
        console.log("");
        out.innerHTML = "error: " + e;
    }

});

function read(url, method) {
    method = method || "GET";
    var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
    var deferred = new Deferred();
    xhr.onreadystatechange = function() {
        if (xhr.readyState === 4) {
            if (xhr.status >= 400) {
                var e = new Error(xhr.statusText);
                e.status = xhr.status;
                deferred.reject(e);
            } else {
                deferred.resolve({
                    responseText: xhr.responseText
                });
            }
        }
    };
    xhr.open(method, url, true);
    xhr.send();
    return deferred.promise;
}