JavaScript waitForTime

By  on  

I write a lot of tests for new features within Firefox DevTools. We have hundreds of "mochitests" which open the browser and perform synthetic actions like clicking, typing, and other user actions. I've previously written about waitForever which essentially halts following actions without locking the browser. Another utility I enjoy is waitForTime, an async JavaScript function that I can await to give breathing time between two tasks.

Whenever I want to wait a given amount of time between tasks, I employ this function:

function waitForTime(ms) {
  return new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, ms));
}

/* Usage */
await waitForTime(200);
// ...do other thing...
await waitForTime(200);
// ...do next thing ...

It's important to point out that most waitForTime calls don't appear in the final test, since arbitrary timeouts lead to intermittent test failures, but they are helpful in knowing where I need to add polling for some other condition!

Recent Features

  • By
    6 Things You Didn’t Know About Firefox OS

    Firefox OS is all over the tech news and for good reason:  Mozilla's finally given web developers the platform that they need to create apps the way they've been creating them for years -- with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.  Firefox OS has been rapidly improving...

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Using MooTools 1.2

    As you can probably tell, I try to mix some fun in with my MooTools madness but I also try to make my examples as practical as possible. Well...this may not be one of those times. I love movies and useless movie trivia so naturally I'm...

  • By
    MooTools Text Flipping

    There are lots and lots of useless but fun JavaScript techniques out there. This is another one of them. One popular April Fools joke I quickly got tired of was websites transforming their text upside down. I found a jQuery Plugin by Paul...

Discussion

  1. Pavan

    I have this kind of a function in all my apps and I usually name is delay.

  2. Dubbya

    You don’t have to put “async” in front of the function?

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