EventEmitter in the middle of a chain of Promises

Question

I am doing something that involves running a sequence of child_process.spawn() in order (to do some setup, then run the actual meaty command that the caller is

Answer 1

There are two approaches, one provides the syntax you originally asked for, the other takes delegates.

function doAllTheThings(){
     var com = runInterestingCommand();
     var p = new Promise(function(resolve, reject){
         com.on("close", resolve);
         com.on("error", reject);
     });
     p.on = function(){ com.on.apply(com, arguments); return p; };
     return p;
}

Which would let you use your desired syntax:

doAllTheThings()
  .on('stdout', function(data){
    // process a chunk of received stdout data
  })
  .on('stderr', function(data){
    // process a chunk of received stderr data
  })
  .then(function(exitStatus){
    // all the things were done
    // and we've returned the exitStatus of
    // a command in the middle of a chain
  });

However, IMO this is somewhat misleading and it might be desirable to pass the delegates in:

function doAllTheThings(onData, onErr){
     var com = runInterestingCommand();
     var p = new Promise(function(resolve, reject){
         com.on("close", resolve);
         com.on("error", reject);
     });
     com.on("stdout", onData).on("strerr", onErr);
     return p;
}

Which would let you do:

doAllTheThings(function(data){
    // process a chunk of received stdout data
  }, function(data){
    // process a chunk of received stderr data
  })
  .then(function(exitStatus){
    // all the things were done
    // and we've returned the exitStatus of
    // a command in the middle of a chain
  });