What Does 'Then' Really Mean in CasperJS

Question

I'm using CasperJS to automate a series of clicks, completed forms, parsing data, etc through a website.

Casper seems to be organized into a list of preset steps in the form of then statements (see their example here: http://casperjs.org/quickstart.html) but it's unclear what triggers the next statement to actually run.

For example, does then wait for all pending requests to complete? Does injectJS count as a pending request? What happens if I have a then statement nested - chained to the end of an open statement?

casper.thenOpen('http://example.com/list', function(){
    casper.page.injectJs('/libs/jquery.js');
    casper.evaluate(function(){
        var id = jQuery("span:contains('"+itemName+"')").closest("tr").find("input:first").val();
        casper.open("http://example.com/show/"+id); //what if 'then' was added here?
    });
});

casper.then(function(){
    //parse the 'show' page
});

I'm looking for a technical explanation of how the flow works in CasperJS. My specific problem is that my last then statement (above) runs before my casper.open statement & I don't know why.

Answer 1

then() basically adds a new navigation step in a stack. A step is a javascript function which can do two different things:

1. waiting for the previous step - if any - being executed
2. waiting for a requested url and related page to load

Let's take a simple navigation scenario:

var casper = require('casper').create();

casper.start();

casper.then(function step1() {
    this.echo('this is step one');
});

casper.then(function step2() {
    this.echo('this is step two');
});

casper.thenOpen('http://google.com/', function step3() {
    this.echo('this is step 3 (google.com is loaded)');
});

You can print out all the created steps within the stack like this:

require('utils').dump(casper.steps.map(function(step) {
    return step.toString();
}));

That gives:

$ casperjs test-steps.js
[
    "function step1() { this.echo('this is step one'); }",
    "function step2() { this.echo('this is step two'); }",
    "function _step() { this.open(location, settings); }",
    "function step3() { this.echo('this is step 3 (google.com is loaded)'); }"
]

Notice the _step() function which has been added automatically by CasperJS to load the url for us; when the url is loaded, the next step available in the stack — which is step3() — is called.

When you have defined your navigation steps, run() executes them one by one sequentially:

casper.run();

Footnote: the callback/listener stuff is an implementation of the Promise pattern.