Is a async/await syntax change planned for the near future?

[JedatKinports]

Hello, I will be starting a new project in the upcoming month and i was wondering. Will be an async/await syntax change in the near future? The async/await syntax is really like heaven compared to callbacks in my opinion. Is this on the todo list for the near future or should we try to find other solutions?

[sidorares]

there are few promise wrappers around, https://www.npmjs.com/package/promise-mysql for example. This is all you need to start using async/await

[JedatKinports]

@sidorares i saw that wrapper already just wondered if this will be added to this package someday. In the meantime i will probably end up using the package you mentioned ( https://github.com/lukeb-uk/node-promise-mysql ) and will just add the await "in-front" of the promise.

[sidorares]

there are pro and cons of having wrapper as part of the driver. I decided to include it in my - https://github.com/sidorares/node-mysql2#using-promise-wrapper but still not sure if that was good decision

[JedatKinports]

Could you elaborate a bit more why you think that it wasn't a good decision? The only bad thing i noticed so far is that a lot of packages do not support/use promises/await/async and are still stuck on callbacks and mixing those i don't like. You end up with too many small functions with callbacks and then it's easier to lose sight of the application flow. My opinion at least.

[sidorares]

I'm talking more from maintainer point of view - less confusion about promise / non-promise api etc. For most users all in one is a good solution

[dougwilson]

Yea, ideally the module would provide just a single API; right now this module (being a very low-level driver) strives to support as many Node.js versions as possible, and as such, serves the lowest-common-dominator. The other thing is that we would have to make some significant changes somehow, as the project uses Event Emitters, and returns Objects from the callback functions, and since the return value will become a Promise instead of a Query object, for example, the API will need to determine how should the sql text string from the ongoing query be provided to the calling user. Ideally, being a base driver, other modules should pop up on npm to wrap this module to provide more user-friendly interfaces, just like you don't want to directly interact with the libmysql library in C for the same reasons.

[JedatKinports]

@dougwilson great explanation. Would be nice to have these intentions for the package listed somewhere in the Readme.md page with some links to some wrappers.

[dougwilson]

Would be nice to have these intentions for the package listed somewhere in the Readme.md page with some links to some wrappers.

Definitely a good first contribution!

[sidorares]

@dougwilson I just had a look at how aws sdk added promise support to existing callback-style api and this is the pattern we could repeat:

   const conn = await mysql.createConnection(opts).promise();
   const data = await conn.query(sql).promise();

or alternatively agree on a standard official promise wrapper module that works with both mysql and mysql2

[jamg44]

If you want you can use this wrapper:

// support promises in conn.query
const originalQueryMethod = connection.query.bind(connection);
connection.query = (sql, cb) => new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    originalQueryMethod(sql, (e, rows, fields) => {
        if (cb) return cb(e, rows, fields);
        return e ? reject(e) : resolve({rows, fields});
    });
});

// now you can use .then(), callbacks or await inside async functions 
const {rows, fields} = await conn.query(sql);

[samcov]

@sidorares has the best short term suggestion, the only other suggestion would be to have something like,

const data = await conn.queryAsync(sql);

So there is no confusion between backwards support and moving forward.

[ebachter]

An option is the built-in utility function util.promisify in Node:

const fn = util.promisify(connection.query).bind(connection);
const rows = await fn('SELECT col1, col2 FROM users WHERE email = ?', [email]);