↩The power of then - sync processing

It's easy to just pass the callback or return a promise if we don't need to do other stuff to the result.

But what if we wanted to do additional processing? What if we want to read a single line of a file? Then we'll need to add some code to split the file into lines and get the specified line. Let's see how we can do that.

Callbacks

To do this with callbacks, we'll pass our custom callback that does the splitting.

The callback bails-out if there was an error reading the file, otherwise proceeds to split the content and call the original callback with the line content:

function readLine(file, line, callback) {
    fs.readFile(file, function process(err, content) {
        if (err) return callback(err);
        callback(null, content.toString().split('\n')[line]);
    });
}
readLine('myfile.txt', 2, function(err, line) {
    // handle error or use line
});

Promises

To create a promise-based function we can use another promise method called .then(). It works exactly the same as .done(), but also returns a promise for the value returned inside its callbacks.

We can simply return the line from inside the first .then callback. We get a promise for that line outside of the callback (which we return from the function)

function readLine(file, line) {
    return fs.readFileAsync(file).then(function(res) {
        return res.toString().split('\n')[line];
    });
}
readLine(file, line).done(function(line) {
    // use line
}, function(err) {
    // handle error
});

When you call a promise's .then function, a new promise is created and returned by .then. It's a promise to apply all the operations inside the then callback after the original async operation completes, and return the result.

Notes

In the callback example, we must explicitly handle the error. Since we can't deal with that error there, we must call the passed callback to pass that error.

In the promise example, we can skip the error handling function. If we do that, the error will automatically propagate with the returned promise for a line. Yes, that means that you don't have to write if (err) return callback(err) anymore - promises do the equivalent of that by default.

Another useful way to think of done vs then: Promise.done() is the equivalent of Array.forEach while Promise.then() is the equivalent of Array.map. You use the first when you don't want to create a new promise, and the second when you do.