Question

I am writing a javascript library to abstract ajax requests to my HTTP API.
Each of my javascript functions is a wrapper for jquery’s ajax call, which makes a callback to the user on completion.

Eg.

mylib.doThing( "foo", { success:function(){alert("done");});

In the case where I want to execute mylib.doFoo twice in series, I have something like:

mylib.doThing( "foo", { success:function(){ mylib.doThing( "bar", { success:function(){alert("done");}); });

For anything more that two steps, this gets messy very quickly.

Is it possible to provide a cleaner syntax, perhaps more like the following? And how would I need to implement mylib.doThing()?

mylib.doThing("foo").mylib.doThing("bar").alert("done");

Answer 1

function doThingFluent(a, b) {
  return {
    _name : a,
    _chainedCall : b,
    doMoreThingFluent : function(a1) {
      return doThing(a1, this);
    },
    done : function(callback) {
      var chained = this._chainedCall;
      var name = this._name;
      while (chained) {
        callback = function(n, c) {
          return function() {
            mylib.doThing(n, { success : c });
          };
        } (name, callback);
        name = chained._name;
        chained = chained._chainedCall;
      }

      mylib.doThing(name, {success: callback});
    }
 };

 doThingFluent("foo").doMoreThingFluent("bar").done(function(){alert("done");})