How can I sequentially chain promises using bluebirdjs?

Question

Promise.all() doesn\'t guarantee that promises will be resolved in order. How can this be done?

Answer 1

The thing that confused me most is that the async function being chained needs to return a function that returns a promise. Here's an example:

function setTimeoutPromise(ms) {
  return new Promise(function (resolve) {
    setTimeout(resolve, ms);
  });
}

function foo(item, ms) {
  return function() {
    return setTimeoutPromise(ms).then(function () {
      console.log(item);
    });
  };
}

var items = ['one', 'two', 'three'];

function bar() {
  var chain = Promise.resolve();
  items.forEach(function (el, i) {
    chain = chain.then(foo(el, (items.length - i)*1000));
  });
  return chain;
}

bar().then(function () {
  console.log('done');
});

Notice that foo returns a function that returns a promise. foo() does not return a promise directly.

See this Live Demo

Answer 2

Since you're using Bluebird JS, this can be actually done in a simple way.

In version 2.0, Bluebird introduced the Promise.each method that does this, for looping a then is simple enough, but since it is so common and got requested time after time eventually it was added as its own method.

function foo(item, ms){ // note bluebird has a delay method
    return Promise.delay(ms, item).then(console.log.bind(console))
}

var items = ['one', 'two', 'three'];

Promise.each(items, function(item, i){
    return foo(item, (items.length - i) * 1000)
});

Which produces the same result as the other answer, only with less lines of code and it also lets Bluebird perform optimizations on the iteration.