Question

This is a simple script to retrieve a ‘CouchDB’ session and get the user information. It utilizes ‘couch.j’s which uses ‘jQuery’. I’ve been using JavaScript for a little while but I can’t figure out how to pass return values and then use them.

$(document).ready(function () {
  this.ctx = getCtx(); //it doesn’t appear that this is actually assigning a variable
  console.log(this.ctx);   //this returns “undefined”
});

function getCtx(){

     $.couch.session({
        async: false,
        success: function(r) {

              ctx = r.userCtx;
              if (ctx != null){ //I added this check because otherwise ctx was returning undefined.

                    console.log("returning ctx: "+ctx);   
//Log says: returning ctx: [object Object]
                    return ctx;                           
//I know this is returning an object, because of the line above

              }
        }
  });
};

What is stumping me even more is that the console.log statement in the $(document).ready function is returning “undefined” before the console.log statement in the getCtx() function returns. Which means that it isn’t giving getCtx() time to execute and actually get the session.

Answer 1

You can move the assignment to the success function of the AJAX call like so

$(document).ready(function () {
  getCtx(this);    
});

function getCtx(obj){

     $.couch.session({
        async: false,
        success: function(r) {

              ctx = r.userCtx;
              if (ctx != null){           

                    console.log("returning ctx: "+ctx);   
                    obj.ctx = ctx;                           

              }
        }
  });
};