promise.rst

Promise

When sending asynchronous HTTP requests, a promise is returned. The promise acts as a proxy for the response or error result, which is not yet known. The PHP-HTTP promise follows the Promises/A+ standard.

Note

Work is underway for a Promise PSR. When that PSR has been released, we will use it in HTTPlug and deprecate our Http\Promise\Promise interface.

Asynchronous requests

Asynchronous requests enable non-blocking HTTP operations. To execute such a request with HTTPlug:

$request = $messageFactory->createRequest('GET', 'http://php-http.org');

// Where $client implements HttpAsyncClient
$promise = $client->sendAsyncRequest($request);

// This code will be executed right after the request is sent, but before
// the response is returned.
echo 'Wow, non-blocking!';

See :ref:`message-factory` on how to use message factories.

Wait

The $promise that is returned implements Http\Promise\Promise. At this point in time, the response is not known yet. You can be polite and wait for that response to arrive:

try {
    $response = $promise->wait();
} catch (\Exception $exception) {
    echo $exception->getMessage();
}

Then

Instead of waiting, however, you can handle things asynchronously. Call the then method with two arguments: one callback that will be executed if the request turns out to be successful and/or a second callback that will be executed if the request results in an error:

$promise->then(
    // The success callback
    function (ResponseInterface $response) {
        echo 'Yay, we have a shiny new response!';

        // Write status code to some log file
        file_put_contents('responses.log', $response->getStatusCode() . "\n", FILE_APPEND);

        return $response;
    },

    // The failure callback
    function (\Exception $exception) {
        echo 'Oh darn, we have a problem';

        throw $exception;
    }
);