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

I highly recommend using $.when() if you're starting from scratch.

Even though this question has over million answers, I still didn't find anything useful for my case. Let's say you have to deal with an existing codebase, already making some ajax calls and don't want to introduce the complexity of promises and/or redo the whole thing.

We can easily take advantage of jQuery .data, .on and .trigger functions which have been a part of jQuery since forever.

Codepen

The good stuff about my solution is:

• it's obvious what the callback exactly depends on

• the function triggerNowOrOnLoaded doesn't care if the data has been already loaded or we're still waiting for it

• it's super easy to plug it into an existing code

$(function() {

  // wait for posts to be loaded
  triggerNowOrOnLoaded("posts", function() {
    var $body = $("body");
    var posts = $body.data("posts");

    $body.append("
Posts: " + posts.length + "
");
  });


  // some ajax requests
  $.getJSON("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts", function(data) {
    $("body").data("posts", data).trigger("posts");
  });

  // doesn't matter if the `triggerNowOrOnLoaded` is called after or before the actual requests 
  $.getJSON("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users", function(data) {
    $("body").data("users", data).trigger("users");
  });


  // wait for both types
  triggerNowOrOnLoaded(["posts", "users"], function() {
    var $body = $("body");
    var posts = $body.data("posts");
    var users = $body.data("users");

    $body.append("
Posts: " + posts.length + " and Users: " + users.length + "
");
  });

  // works even if everything has already loaded!
  setTimeout(function() {

    // triggers immediately since users have been already loaded
    triggerNowOrOnLoaded("users", function() {
      var $body = $("body");
      var users = $body.data("users");

      $body.append("
Delayed Users: " + users.length + "
");
    });

  }, 2000); // 2 seconds

});

// helper function
function triggerNowOrOnLoaded(types, callback) {
  types = $.isArray(types) ? types : [types];

  var $body = $("body");

  var waitForTypes = [];
  $.each(types, function(i, type) {

    if (typeof $body.data(type) === 'undefined') {
      waitForTypes.push(type);
    }
  });

  var isDataReady = waitForTypes.length === 0;
  if (isDataReady) {
    callback();
    return;
  }

  // wait for the last type and run this function again for the rest of the types
  var waitFor = waitForTypes.pop();
  $body.on(waitFor, function() {
    // remove event handler - we only want the stuff triggered once
    $body.off(waitFor);

    triggerNowOrOnLoaded(waitForTypes, callback);
  });
}

Hi!