Handling multiple catches in promise chain

Question

I am still fairly new to promises and am using bluebird currently, however I have a scenario where I am not quite sure how to best deal with it.

So for example I have a promise chain within an express app like so:

repository.Query(getAccountByIdQuery)
        .catch(function(error){
            res.status(404).send({ error: "No account found with this Id" });
        })
        .then(convertDocumentToModel)
        .then(verifyOldPassword)
        .catch(function(error) {
            res.status(406).send({ OldPassword: error });
        })
        .then(changePassword)
        .then(function(){
            res.status(200).send();
        })
        .catch(function(error){
            console.log(error);
            res.status(500).send({ error: "Unable to change password" });
        });

So the behaviour I am after is:

• Goes to get account by Id
• If there is a rejection at this point, bomb out and return an error
• If there is no error convert the document returned to a model
• Verify the password with the database document
• If the passwords dont match then bomb out and return a different error
• If there is no error change the passwords
• Then return success
• If anything else went wrong, return a 500

So currently catches do not seem to stop the chaining, and that makes sense, so I am wondering if there is a way for me to somehow force the chain to stop at a certain point based upon the errors, or if there is a better way to structure this to get some form of branching behaviour, as there is a case of if X do Y else Z.

Any help would be great.

Answer 1

This behavior is exactly like a synchronous throw:

try{
    throw new Error();
} catch(e){
    // handle
} 
// this code will run, since you recovered from the error!

That's half of the point of .catch - to be able to recover from errors. It might be desirable to rethrow to signal the state is still an error:

try{
    throw new Error();
} catch(e){
    // handle
    throw e; // or a wrapper over e so we know it wasn't handled
} 
// this code will not run

However, this alone won't work in your case since the error be caught by a later handler. The real issue here is that generalized "HANDLE ANYTHING" error handlers are a bad practice in general and are extremely frowned upon in other programming languages and ecosystems. For this reason Bluebird offers typed and predicate catches.

The added advantage is that your business logic does not (and shouldn't) have to be aware of the request/response cycle at all. It is not the query's responsibility to decide which HTTP status and error the client gets and later as your app grows you might want to separate the business logic (how to query your DB and how to process your data) from what you send to the client (what http status code, what text and what response).

Here is how I'd write your code.

First, I'd get .Query to throw a NoSuchAccountError, I'd subclass it from Promise.OperationalError which Bluebird already provides. If you're unsure how to subclass an error let me know.

I'd additionally subclass it for AuthenticationError and then do something like:

function changePassword(queryDataEtc){ 
    return repository.Query(getAccountByIdQuery)
                     .then(convertDocumentToModel)
                     .then(verifyOldPassword)
                     .then(changePassword);
}

As you can see - it's very clean and you can read the text like an instruction manual of what happens in the process. It is also separated from the request/response.

Now, I'd call it from the route handler as such:

 changePassword(params)
 .catch(NoSuchAccountError, function(e){
     res.status(404).send({ error: "No account found with this Id" });
 }).catch(AuthenticationError, function(e){
     res.status(406).send({ OldPassword: error });
 }).error(function(e){ // catches any remaining operational errors
     res.status(500).send({ error: "Unable to change password" });
 }).catch(function(e){
     res.status(500).send({ error: "Unknown internal server error" });
 });

This way, the logic is all in one place and the decision of how to handle errors to the client is all in one place and they don't clutter eachother.