Understanding protractor's use of promises

Question

Essentially I am playing around with getting a library for preconditions set up (think user creation). As protractor is promise-based and magically does all the wrapping to

Answer 1

It's not enough just to create a protractor.promise deferred object - you need to tell the control flow about it. This is usually done with protractor.promise.controlFlow().execute().

function timeout(ms) {
  protractor.promise.controlFlow().execute(function() {
    var deferred = protractor.promise.defer();
    setTimeout(function() {
      console.log('qwer');
      deferred.fulfill(true);
    }, ms);
    return deferred.promise;
  });
}

Read through https://code.google.com/p/selenium/source/browse/javascript/webdriver/promise.js for all the magic behind the scenes here.