Promise inside promise: what's the correct way to return a variable from the child promise? (JS)

The definition of promises is that you cannot literally assign result to myresult. However, you can make myresult a promise that resolves directly to result for the caller, however many promises were used to get that. The basic idea is that inside of each function in your above block, you should be returning the next Promise in the chain. eg:

function top() {

  //promise1
  return ParentPromise({
    ...some code here...
  }).then(function() {


    //promise2
        return ChildPromise({
          ..some code here...
        }).then(function(response) {
         var result = response.result.items;
         return result;

        });

});

};

In the end, the code calling top() won't know or care that 1, 2, or 12 chained promises were used to get result. It will also be able to register an error callback in case any of those promises failed.

The neatest way in my opinion is to return the promise and chain them 'down' instead of to the left, avoiding christmas tree-like callback hell.

function top() {
  //promise1
  return ParentPromise({
    ...some code here...
  }).then(function(parent) {
    //promise2
    return ChildPromise(parent.id)
  }).then(function(response) {
    // do something with `result`

    return response.result.items;
  });
}

top().then(function(items){
  // all done 
});

Edit: Or in ES6 / lambda notation;

function top() {
  return ParentPromise().then(parent => {
    return ChildPromise(parent.id)
  }).then(response => {
    return response.result.items
  })
}

top().then(items => {
  // all done 
})

Edit: Or using Async/Await;

async function top() {
  const parent = await ParentPromise()
  const child = await ChildPromise(parent.id)

  return child.result.items
}

top().then(items => {
  // all done 
})