Promise - is it possible to force cancel a promise

In modern JavaScript - no

Promises have settled (hah) and it appears like it will never be possible to cancel a (pending) promise.

Instead, there is a cross-platform (Node, Browsers etc) cancellation primitive as part of WHATWG (a standards body that also builds HTML) called AbortController. You can use it to cancel functions that return promises rather than promises themselves:

// Take a signal parameter in the function that needs cancellation
async function somethingIWantToCancel({ signal } = {}) {
  // either pass it directly to APIs that support it
  // (fetch and most Node APIs do)
  const response = await fetch('.../', { signal });
  // return response.json;

  // or if the API does not already support it -
  // manually adapt your code to support signals:
  const onAbort = (e) => {
    // run any code relating to aborting here
  };
  signal.addEventListener('abort', onAbort, { once: true });
  // and be sure to clean it up when the action you are performing
  // is finished to avoid a leak
  // ... sometime later ...
  signal.removeEventListener('abort', onAbort);
}

// Usage
const ac = new AbortController();
setTimeout(() => ac.abort(), 1000); // give it a 1s timeout
try {
  await somethingIWantToCancel({ signal: ac.signal });
} catch (e) {
  if (e.name === 'AbortError') {
    // deal with cancellation in caller, or ignore
  } else {
    throw e; // don't swallow errors :)
  }
}

No. We can't do that yet.

ES6 promises do not support cancellation yet. It's on its way, and its design is something a lot of people worked really hard on. Sound cancellation semantics are hard to get right and this is work in progress. There are interesting debates on the "fetch" repo, on esdiscuss and on several other repos on GH but I'd just be patient if I were you.

But, but, but.. cancellation is really important!

It is, the reality of the matter is cancellation is really an important scenario in client-side programming. The cases you describe like aborting web requests are important and they're everywhere.

So... the language screwed me!

Yeah, sorry about that. Promises had to get in first before further things were specified - so they went in without some useful stuff like .finally and .cancel - it's on its way though, to the spec through the DOM. Cancellation is not an afterthought it's just a time constraint and a more iterative approach to API design.

So what can I do?

You have several alternatives:

  • Use a third party library like bluebird who can move a lot faster than the spec and thus have cancellation as well as a bunch of other goodies - this is what large companies like WhatsApp do.
  • Pass a cancellation token.

Using a third party library is pretty obvious. As for a token, you can make your method take a function in and then call it, as such:

function getWithCancel(url, token) { // the token is for cancellation
   var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest;
   xhr.open("GET", url);
   return new Promise(function(resolve, reject) {
      xhr.onload = function() { resolve(xhr.responseText); });
      token.cancel = function() {  // SPECIFY CANCELLATION
          xhr.abort(); // abort request
          reject(new Error("Cancelled")); // reject the promise
      };
      xhr.onerror = reject;
   });
};

Which would let you do:

var token = {};
var promise = getWithCancel("/someUrl", token);

// later we want to abort the promise:
token.cancel();

Your actual use case - last

This isn't too hard with the token approach:

function last(fn) {
    var lastToken = { cancel: function(){} }; // start with no op
    return function() {
        lastToken.cancel();
        var args = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments);
        args.push(lastToken);
        return fn.apply(this, args);
    };
}

Which would let you do:

var synced = last(getWithCancel);
synced("/url1?q=a"); // this will get canceled 
synced("/url1?q=ab"); // this will get canceled too
synced("/url1?q=abc");  // this will get canceled too
synced("/url1?q=abcd").then(function() {
    // only this will run
});

And no, libraries like Bacon and Rx don't "shine" here because they're observable libraries, they just have the same advantage user level promise libraries have by not being spec bound. I guess we'll wait to have and see in ES2016 when observables go native. They are nifty for typeahead though.


Standard proposals for cancellable promises have failed.

A promise is not a control surface for the async action fulfilling it; confuses owner with consumer. Instead, create asynchronous functions that can be cancelled through some passed-in token.

Another promise makes a fine token, making cancel easy to implement with Promise.race:

Example: Use Promise.race to cancel the effect of a previous chain:

let cancel = () => {};

input.oninput = function(ev) {
  let term = ev.target.value;
  console.log(`searching for "${term}"`);
  cancel();
  let p = new Promise(resolve => cancel = resolve);
  Promise.race([p, getSearchResults(term)]).then(results => {
    if (results) {
      console.log(`results for "${term}"`,results);
    }
  });
}

function getSearchResults(term) {
  return new Promise(resolve => {
    let timeout = 100 + Math.floor(Math.random() * 1900);
    setTimeout(() => resolve([term.toLowerCase(), term.toUpperCase()]), timeout);
  });
}
Search: <input id="input">

Here we're "cancelling" previous searches by injecting an undefined result and testing for it, but we could easily imagine rejecting with "CancelledError" instead.

Of course this doesn't actually cancel the network search, but that's a limitation of fetch. If fetch were to take a cancel promise as argument, then it could cancel the network activity.

I've proposed this "Cancel promise pattern" on es-discuss, exactly to suggest that fetch do this.


I have checked out Mozilla JS reference and found this:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Promise/race

Let's check it out:

var p1 = new Promise(function(resolve, reject) { 
    setTimeout(resolve, 500, "one"); 
});
var p2 = new Promise(function(resolve, reject) { 
    setTimeout(resolve, 100, "two"); 
});

Promise.race([p1, p2]).then(function(value) {
  console.log(value); // "two"
  // Both resolve, but p2 is faster
});

We have here p1, and p2 put in Promise.race(...) as arguments, this is actually creating new resolve promise, which is what you require.


With AbortController

It is possible to use abort controller to reject promise or resolve on your demand:

let controller = new AbortController();

let task = new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
  // some logic ...
  controller.signal.addEventListener('abort', () => {
    reject('oops'));
  }
});

controller.abort(); // task is now in rejected state

Also it's better to remove event listener on abort to prevent memory leaks

Same works for cancelling fetch:

let controller = new AbortController();
fetch(url, {
  signal: controller.signal
});

or just pass controller:

let controller = new AbortController();
fetch(url, controller);

And call abort method to cancel one, or infinite number of fetches where you passed this controller controller.abort();

Tags:

Javascript

Promise

Cancellation

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