How to Determine a JavaScript Promise’s Status

By  on  

Promises have changed the landscape of JavaScript. Many old APIs have been reincarnated to use Promises (XHR to fetch, Battery API), while new APIs trend toward Promises. Developers can use async/await to handle promises, or then/catch/finally with callbacks, but what Promises don't tell you is their status. Wouldn't it be great if the Promise.prototype provided developers a status property to know whether a promise is rejected, resolved, or just done?

My research led me to this gist which I found quite clever. I took some time to modify a bit of code and add comments. The following solution provides helper methods for determining a Promise's status:

// Uses setTimeout with Promise to create an arbitrary delay time
// In these examples, a 0 millisecond delay is 
// an instantly resolving promise that we can jude status against
async function delay(milliseconds = 0, returnValue) {
  return new Promise(done => setTimeout((() => done(returnValue)), milliseconds));
}

// Promise.race in all of these functions uses delay of 0 to
// instantly resolve.  If the promise is resolved or rejected,
// returning that value will beat the setTimeout in the race

async function isResolved(promise) {
  return await Promise.race([delay(0, false), promise.then(() => true, () => false)]);
}

async function isRejected(promise) {
  return await Promise.race([delay(0, false), promise.then(() => false, () => true)]);
}

async function isFinished(promise) {
  return await Promise.race([delay(0, false), promise.then(() => true, () => true)]);
}

A few examples of usage:

// Testing isResolved
await isResolved(new Promise(resolve => resolve())); // true
await isResolved(new Promise((_, reject) => reject()));  // false

// Testing isRejected
await isRejected(new Promise((_, reject) => reject())); // true

// We done yet?
await isFinished(new Promise(resolve => resolve())); // true
await isFinished(new Promise((_, reject) => reject()));  // true

Developers can always add another await or then to a Promise to execute something but it is interesting to figure out the status of a given Promise. Is there an easier way to know a Promise's status? Let me know!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    jQuery Comment Preview

    I released a MooTools comment preview script yesterday and got numerous requests for a jQuery version. Ask and you shall receive! I'll use the exact same CSS and HTML as yesterday. The XHTML The CSS The jQuery JavaScript On the keypress and blur events, we validate and...

  • By
    Using Opacity to Show Focus with MooTools

    I'm a huge fan of using subtle effects like link nudging (jQuery, MooTools) to enhance the user experience and increase the perceived dynamism of my websites. Trust me -- a lot of little things are what take websites to the next level.

Discussion

  1. Gordon
    function state(promise: Promise) {
        let state = "pending";
        promise.then(() => state = "fulfilled", () => state = "rejected");
        return () => state;
    }
    
    const p = Promise.resolve(42);
    const s = state(p);
    console.log(s());   //  pending
    setTimeout(() => {
        console.log(s());  //  fulfilled
    }, 0);
    

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!