Iterate

2016-02-10

iterate is a utility function that allows for execution of asynchronous code in the iteratee, waiting for each iteration to finish before moving on. This was inspired by the plugin interface of the Node.js server framework Hapi. Hapi plugins historically had the following structure:

function myPlugin(server, options, next) {
  doSomethingAsynchronous(() => {
    next();
  });
}

The next plugin in the queue won’t be registered until the preceding plugin calls next(). My goal was to implement a similar functionality for arrays, like forEach, but with an extra next parameter passed to the iteratee.

Implementation

/**
 * Synchronously iterates over each element in an array,
 * allowing execution of asynchronous code in the iteratee.
 */
function iterate(arr, iteratee, done) {
  const len = arr.length;

  const iterator = (i) => {
    if (i in arr) {
      iteratee(arr[i], i, arr, () => {
        iterator(i + 1);
      });
    } else {
      done();
    }
  };

  iterator(0);
}

Example:

const arr = ['foo', 'bar', 'baz'];

console.log('start');

iterate(arr, (item, i, arr, next) => {
  setTimeout(() => {
    console.log(item);
    next();
  }, 1000);
}, () => {
  console.log('finish');
});

> +0s "start"
> +1s "foo"
> +1s "bar"
> +1s "baz"
> +0s "finish"