jQuery using .when and pushing an array

Question

Have been looking into getting callbacks for ajax() responses using $.when I'm still unsure how this works fully but this is what I would like the below to do.

When a user adds a town and country per line, it goes to the url in the .ajax() I get a response and it pushes the array to be usable outside of the .each() loop.

At the moment you will see inside here at jsbin that when the button is pressed firstly the response in console.log is [] then when I press it again the addresses show up. then a 3rd press will add the addresses again which shouldn't happen.

jQuery

var addresses,town;
var arrayLocation = [];

$('button').click(function(){
    addresses = function() {
        deferred = new $.Deferred();
        var arrayOfLines = $('#gps').val().split('\n');
        $.each(arrayOfLines, function(index, item) {
            town = item.split(',');
            $.ajax({
                url: 'http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address='+town[0]+'&sensor=false',
                dataType: 'json',
                success: function (data) {
                    add = data.results[0].address_components[0].long_name;
                    lat = data.results[0].geometry.location.lat;
                    lng = data.results[0].geometry.location.lng;
                    arrayLocation.push("['"+add+"', "+lat+", "+lng+"]");
                    console.log("['"+add+"', "+lat+", "+lng+"]");
                }
            });
        });
        return arrayLocation;
    };
    $.when(addresses()).then(function(arrayLocation){
        console.log(arrayLocation);
    });
});

Related: [Pass in an array of Deferreds to $.when()](http://stackoverflow.com/q/5627284/1048572), but it needs to be an array of deferreds not an array with (not-yet-existing) responses — Bergi, Jul 27 '14 at 12:29

Jon · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-08T12:31:36.613

You are not using $.when correctly. The main problem is that the addresses function returns a bare array. It's true that this array will be populated in the future when an async operation (the set of AJAX calls) completes, but from the point of view of addresses's caller this is impossible to know. Therefore the caller has absolutely no chance of reacting to the operation being completed.

What you would normally do is return the return value of $.ajax to the caller, somewhat like this:

addresses = function() {
    return $.ajax({ ... });
};

The caller could then do

$.when(addresses()).then(function(result) { ... });

In this particular example however this is not directly possible because there are multiple AJAX calls being made, so you need some way of "combining" all of them into one package. There are multiple ways to do this, so there is also a matter of what you prefer here.

One solution would be to use an array of AJAX promises:

$('button').click(function(){
    var arrayLocation = [];
    addresses = function() {
        var promises = [];
        var arrayOfLines = $('#gps').val().split('\n');
        $.each(arrayOfLines, function(index, item) {
            town = item.split(',');
            promises.push($.ajax({
                url: 'http://maps.googleapis.com/...',
                dataType: 'json',
                success: function (data) {
                    add = data.results[0].address_components[0].long_name;
                    lat = data.results[0].geometry.location.lat;
                    lng = data.results[0].geometry.location.lng;
                    arrayLocation.push("['"+add+"', "+lat+", "+lng+"]");
                    console.log("['"+add+"', "+lat+", "+lng+"]");
                }
            }));
        });
        return promises;
    };

    $.when.apply($, addresses()).then(function(){
        console.log(arrayLocation);
    });
});

There are a couple points of note here:

Returning an array of independent promises means that you cannot feed them to $.when directly because that function is designed to accept multiple individual promises instead of an array; you need to use apply to compensate.
I have moved the declaration of arrayLocation inside the click event handler so that it gets reset each time you click the button. The problem of results being added again after each click was due to this array not being reset.
The final handler does not accept any arguments. That's because the arguments that will be passed are the jqXHR objects representing the individual AJAX requests, which is not really useful. Instead of this it captures arrayLocation by closure, since you know independently that the results will be stored there.

Ugh, half way through typing up my answer and I see this. Too quick! Great answer. — Bill Criswell, Nov 08 '13 at 12:33

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 08 '13 at 13:38

Slightly different approach without a shared global variables

$('button').click(function () {
    var addresses = function () {
        var arrayOfLines = $('#gps').val().split('\n'),
            arrayLocation = [];
        $.each(arrayOfLines, function (index, item) {
            var town = item.split(',');
            var xhr = $.ajax({
                url: 'http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=' + $.trim(town[0]) + '&sensor=false',
                dataType: 'json'
            });
            arrayLocation.push(xhr);
        });

        return $.when.apply($, arrayLocation).then(function () {
            return $.map(arguments, function (args) {
                if (!$.isArray(args[0].results) || args[0].results.length == 0) {
                    return undefined;
                }
                var data = args[0].results[0];
                var location = data.geometry.location;

                var add = data.address_components[0].long_name;
                var lat = location.lat;
                var lng = lng;

                return "['" + add + "', " + lat + ", " + lng + "]";
            });
        });

        return arrayLocation;
    };

    addresses().done(function (arrayLocation) {
        console.log(arrayLocation)
    })
});

Demo: Fiddle

jQuery using .when and pushing an array

2 Answers2