Wait for request to finish Node.js

Question

I am currently having an issue with figuring out how to wait for the request to finish before returning any data. I do not believe I can do this with a Callback and I have n

Answer 1

You need to use callbacks. Change your API grabber to this:

function getItems(amount, callback) {
// some code... 
request({
  url: url,
  json: true
}, function (error, response, body) {
   // some code...
   if (!error && response.statusCode === 200) {
      // some code    
      callback(items); <-- pass items to the callback to "return" it
   }
})
}

Then change the xml generator to also accept callbacks:

function generateXML(callback){
// Code to generate XML
var API = require('./API');
API.getItems("5",function(response){
  for(var i = 1; i <= response.length; i++)
  {
    // more code to generate further XML using the API response
  }

  // Finish generating and return the XML
  callback(xml_result); // <-- again, "return" the result via callback
});
}

Then in your server code do:

var xml = require('./XMLGenerator');
response.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/xml'});
xml.generateXML(function(xmlstring){
    response.write(xmlstring);
    response.end();
});