Question

I’m using Redis to generate IDs for my in memory stored models. The Redis client requires a callback to the INCR command, which means the code looks like

client.incr('foo', function(err, id) {
  ... continue on here
});

The problem is, that I already have written the other part of the app, that expects the incr call to be synchronous and just return the ID, so that I can use it like

var id = client.incr('foo');

The reason why I got to this problem is that up until now, I was generating the IDs just in memory with a simple closure counter function, like

var counter = (function() {
  var count = 0;
  return function() {
    return ++count;
  }
})();

to simplify the testing and just general setup.

Does this mean that my app is flawed by design and I need to rewrite it to expect callback on generating IDs? Or is there any simple way to just synchronize the call?

Answer 1

Node.js in its essence is an async I/O library (with plugins). So, by definition, there’s no synchronous I/O there and you should rewrite your app.