↩Complex task dependencies

Sometimes our task dependencies are complex enough that we might need to run some things in parallel and other things in series.

Lets say we have a versioned file and we want to get a diff of the latest two versions. To do this, we need to get the IDs of the latest two versions, then get their content, then compare the content of the first with the other and finally do something with the result.

Callbacks

With callbacks we would combine async.waterfall and async.parallel

async.waterfall([
    files.getLastTwoVersions.bind(files),
    function(items, callback) {
        async.parallel([
            versions.get.bind(versions, item.last),
            versions.get.bind(versions, item.previous)],
            callback)
    },
    function(v, callback) {
        diffService.compare(v[0].blob, v[1].blob, callback)
    }],
    function(err, diff) {
        // voila, diff is ready. Do something with it.
    })

Promises

With promises we can simply return an array, then use Promise.spread available in both bluebird and Q. It works on promises for arrays and resolves all the items in the array then passes them to the callback:

files.getLastTwoVersions(filename)
    .then(function(items) {
        return [versions.get(items.last),
                versions.get(items.previous)];
    })
    .spread(function(v1, v2) {
        return diffService.compare(v1.blob, v2.blob)
    })
    .then(function(diff) {
        // voila, diff is ready. Do something with it.
    });

Notes

TODO.