Promisification

Promisification – is a long word for a simple transform. It’s conversion of a function that accepts a callback into a function returning a promise.

To be more precise, we create a wrapper-function that does the same, internally calling the original one, but returns a promise.

Such transforms are often needed in real-life, as many functions and libraries are callback-based. But promises are more convenient. So it makes sense to promisify those.

For instance, we have loadScript(src, callback) from the chapter Callback fonksiyonlarına giriş.

function loadScript(src, callback) {
  let script = document.createElement('script');
  script.src = src;

  script.onload = () => callback(null, script);
  script.onerror = () => callback(new Error(`Script load error for ${src}`));

  document.head.append(script);
}

// usage:
// loadScript('path/script.js', (err, script) => {...})

Let’s promisify it. The new loadScriptPromise(src) function will do the same, but accept only src (no callback) and return a promise.

let loadScriptPromise = function(src) {
  return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    loadScript(src, (err, script) => {
      if (err) reject(err)
      else resolve(script);
    });
  })
}

// usage:
// loadScriptPromise('path/script.js').then(...)

Now loadScriptPromise fits well in our promise-based code.

As we can see, it delegates all the work to the original loadScript, providing its own callback that translates to promise resolve/reject.

As we may need to promisify many functions, it makes sense to use a helper.

That’s actually very simple – promisify(f) below takes a to-promisify function f and returns a wrapper function.

That wrapper does the same as in the code above: returns a promise and passes the call to the original f, tracking the result in a custom callback:

function promisify(f) {
  return function (...args) { // return a wrapper-function
    return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
      function callback(err, result) { // our custom callback for f
        if (err) {
          return reject(err);
        } else {
          resolve(result);
        }
      }

      args.push(callback); // append our custom callback to the end of arguments

      f.call(this, ...args); // call the original function
    });
  };
};

// usage:
let loadScriptPromise = promisify(loadScript);
loadScriptPromise(...).then(...);

Here we assume that the original function expects a callback with two arguments (err, result). That’s what we encounter most often. Then our custom callback is in exactly the right format, and promisify works great for such a case.

But what if the original f expects a callback with more arguments callback(err, res1, res2)?

Here’s a modification of promisify that returns an array of multiple callback results:

// promisify(f, true) to get array of results
function promisify(f, manyArgs = false) {
  return function (...args) {
    return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
      function callback(err, ...results) { // our custom callback for f
        if (err) {
          return reject(err);
        } else {
          // resolve with all callback results if manyArgs is specified
          resolve(manyArgs ? results : results[0]);
        }
      }

      args.push(callback);

      f.call(this, ...args);
    });
  };
};

// usage:
f = promisify(f, true);
f(...).then(arrayOfResults => ..., err => ...)

In some cases, err may be absent at all: callback(result), or there’s something exotic in the callback format, then we can promisify such functions without using the helper, manually.

There are also modules with a bit more flexible promisification functions, e.g. es6-promisify. In Node.js, there’s a built-in util.promisify function for that.