Wait until all jQuery Ajax requests are done?

Question

How do I make a function wait until all jQuery Ajax requests are done inside another function?

In short, I need to wait for all Ajax requests to be done before I exe

Answer 1

NOTE: The above answers use functionality that didn't exist at the time that this answer was written. I recommend using jQuery.when() instead of these approaches, but I'm leaving the answer for historical purposes.

-

You could probably get by with a simple counting semaphore, although how you implement it would be dependent on your code. A simple example would be something like...

var semaphore  = 0,     // counting semaphore for ajax requests
    all_queued = false; // bool indicator to account for instances where the first request might finish before the second even starts

semaphore++;
$.get('ajax/test1.html', function(data) {
    semaphore--;
    if (all_queued && semaphore === 0) {
        // process your custom stuff here
    }
});

semaphore++;
$.get('ajax/test2.html', function(data) {
    semaphore--;
    if (all_queued && semaphore === 0) {
        // process your custom stuff here
    }
});

semaphore++;
$.get('ajax/test3.html', function(data) {
    semaphore--;
    if (all_queued && semaphore === 0) {
        // process your custom stuff here
    }
});

semaphore++;
$.get('ajax/test4.html', function(data) {
    semaphore--;
    if (all_queued && semaphore === 0) {
        // process your custom stuff here
    }
});

// now that all ajax requests are queued up, switch the bool to indicate it
all_queued = true;

If you wanted this to operate like {async: false} but you didn't want to lock the browser, you could accomplish the same thing with a jQuery queue.

var $queue = $("
");
$queue.queue(function(){
    $.get('ajax/test1.html', function(data) {
        $queue.dequeue();
    });
}).queue(function(){
    $.get('ajax/test2.html', function(data) {
        $queue.dequeue();
    });
}).queue(function(){
    $.get('ajax/test3.html', function(data) {
        $queue.dequeue();
    });
}).queue(function(){
    $.get('ajax/test4.html', function(data) {
        $queue.dequeue();
    });
});