Async Getters and Setters. Is it Possible?

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The other day I was refactoring some tests so I made a wrapper to access some mocked information with ease. This wrapper contained some getters and one of them retrieved a value asynchronously. Unfortunately, JavasScript syntax does not support asynchronous getters.

So. Is it not possible to have async getters? Well, it is. JavaScript lacks an async get syntax but you can rely on several workarounds.

Just return a promise

As you should know by now:

Async functions always return a promise. If the return value of an async function is not explicitly a promise, it will be implicitly wrapped in a promise.

So, a getter that returns a Promise is an async getter.

This works but I suppose that if you want to use async get is to fully use the async/await syntax, not using then/catch.

Using IIFEs

To return a Promise while using the async/await syntax we can resort to IIFEs. A getter can return the inmediate execution of an anonymous async function, therefore a promise.

Notice the use of arrow functions. They are executed in the scope where they were defined. Meaning that this will behave as expected.

And, what about defineProperty?

Yep. We can also use defineProperty to deal with async getters.

Either Object.defineProperty or Reflect.defineProperty will work. They only differ slightly:

Object.defineProperty returns the object or throws a TypeError if the property has not been successfully defined. Reflect.defineProperty, however, simply returns a Boolean indicating whether or not the property was successfully defined.

IFFE get vs defineProperty

For the most part you can use either of them. Be aware of the difference between using get and defineProperty if you are dealing with classes.

When using get the property will be defined on the instance's prototype, while using Object.defineProperty() the property will be defined on the instance it is applied to.

Personally, I try to avoid classes so this subtleties do not concern me. In my case it’s a matter of personal taste. I do prefer the IIFEE get approach by far.

Async setters

There is no async set syntax either, but we can use the same workarounds we’ve seen to define async setters.

However, it woudn’t make much sense to do so. The assignement expression return value is discarded so you cannot await for the setter to end. Why bother?

I can think several scenarios were async getters may be useful, but it’s really hard to come with an example were an async setter makes sense. If you have one, please, leave a comment :)

Summing up

Sometimes an asynchronous getter is the best answer to a problem. Not having an async get syntax is a shame, but we can overcome this limitation with simple workarounds. Always keep in mind the relation between promises and async functions.