ajax inside an inner forEach loop, finished after the inside callback fires

ajax, javascript, node.js

Solution

Add a counter variable inside the loop, and decrement it every time the async methods complete. Once the counter hits zero, call callback. In pseudo-code:

 var counter = 0;
 foreach(function() {
     counter++;
     doAsync(function() {
           // add to list

           counter--;
           if (counter === 0) {
               callback(list);
           }
     });
 }

Hope that helps.

Problem

I have an ajax call that is inside a forEach loop which is inside another function. The problem is, that the callback of the outer function fires before the inner loop ends - so "staticItemList" is not filled with the items when passed to the callback. How can I fix that ? I really spent a lot of hours on that. Thanks. ``` exports.buildTheList = function (parsedList, callback) { var staticItemList = {}; parsedList.forEach(function(parsedItem) { db.staticList.find({"_id":parsedItem.ID}).forEach(function(err, doc) { if (!doc){ console.log("newStaticItem not found in db"); parsedDataFetcher.fetchParsedDetails(Path, function(parsedDetails){ staticItemList["_id"] = parsedItem.ID; staticItemList[parsedItem.ID] = { "_id": parsedItem.ID, "type": parsedItem.type, } }) }else { console.log("newStaticItem already found in db"); } }); }); callback(staticItemList); } ```

Original source