using setTimeout on promise chain

Question

Here i am trying to wrap my head around promises.Here on first request i fetch a set of links.and on next request i fetch the content of first link.But i want to make a delay before returning next promise object.So i use setTimeout on it.But it gives me the following JSON error (without setTimeout() it works just fine)

SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data

i would like to know why it fails?

let globalObj={};
function getLinks(url){
    return new Promise(function(resolve,reject){

       let http = new XMLHttpRequest();
       http.onreadystatechange = function(){
            if(http.readyState == 4){
              if(http.status == 200){
                resolve(http.response);
              }else{
                reject(new Error());
              }
            }           
       }
       http.open("GET",url,true);
       http.send();
    });
}

getLinks('links.txt').then(function(links){
    let all_links = (JSON.parse(links));
    globalObj=all_links;

    return getLinks(globalObj["one"]+".txt");

}).then(function(topic){


    writeToBody(topic);
    setTimeout(function(){
         return getLinks(globalObj["two"]+".txt"); // without setTimeout it works fine 
         },1000);
});

Answer 1

To keep the promise chain going, you can't use setTimeout() the way you did because you aren't returning a promise from the .then() handler - you're returning it from the setTimeout() callback which does you no good.

Instead, you can make a simple little delay function like this:

function delay(t, v) {
   return new Promise(function(resolve) { 
       setTimeout(resolve.bind(null, v), t)
   });
}

And, then use it like this:

getLinks('links.txt').then(function(links){
    let all_links = (JSON.parse(links));
    globalObj=all_links;

    return getLinks(globalObj["one"]+".txt");

}).then(function(topic){
    writeToBody(topic);
    // return a promise here that will be chained to prior promise
    return delay(1000).then(function() {
        return getLinks(globalObj["two"]+".txt");
    });
});

Here you're returning a promise from the .then() handler and thus it is chained appropriately.

---

You can also add a delay method to the Promise object and then directly use a .delay(x) method on your promises like this:

function delay(t, v) {
   return new Promise(function(resolve) { 
       setTimeout(resolve.bind(null, v), t)
   });
}

Promise.prototype.delay = function(t) {
    return this.then(function(v) {
        return delay(t, v);
    });
}


Promise.resolve("hello").delay(500).then(function(v) {
    console.log(v);
});

Or, use the Bluebird promise library which already has the .delay() method built-in.