Error handling in JavaScript can be easy while being tricky at certain places, especially Promises. JS allows error handling with the help of try, catch, and throw.

const main = () => {
  try {
    // Do something super crazy
    if (!bakePizza()) {
      throw new Error('Oh no!');
    }
  } catch (error) {
    // That escalated quickly
    handleOvenExplosion();
  }
}

This seems simple enough but gets a little tricky when Promises are involved.

Let’s look at a simple example of a Promise. The following Promise function fetches a list of user profiles from the database, where the result set is resolved by the promise function and the error is rejected.

const userProfileQuery = new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
  connection.query('SELECT * FROM Users', [], (err, result) => {
    if (err) reject({ type: 'SQL', err});
    connection.release();
    resolve(result);
});
userProfileQuery
  .then((data) => {
    const userList = data;
    // Do something crazy with the list
  })
  .catch((err) => {
    // Oh, snap!
    // Handle error
  });

In an ideal world, we’d want to have a single try-catch block to handle all errors that occur in that single file.

const { getUserProfiles } = require('./helpers');
module.exports = () => {
  try {
    let userProfileList;
    getUserProfiles
      .then((data) => {
        userProfileList = data;
      })
      .catch((error) => {
        // Handle Promise Error
        // All errors thrown in this promise land here
      });
  } catch (error) {
    // Handle errors in this module
  }
}

The above module is simple — It fetches a list of user profiles with the help of a Promise function.

But the problem with the above module is that when we throw a new Error inside the then block of the promise, it will always pass to the catch block of the promise. That is because throwing a new error inside a then block of a promise will always be passed to the catch block of the invoking promise function. This does not allow us to handle all errors in a module with a singular try-catch block.

But, alas! There is a way to handle this with the help of Async/Await. Let me explain this better with an example —

const { getUserProfiles } = require('./helpers');
module.exports = async () => {
  try {
    const userProfileList = await getUserProfiles;
  } catch (error) {
    // Handle errors in this module
    switch (type) {
      case ERROR_SQL:
        // Handle SQL errors
      default:
        // Handle common errors
    }
  }
}

This little addition of async/await in your code does two things —
Assign the value to the variable which was resolved by the promise function.

Throw error if the promise function rejects anything.
Note that the value assignment works only when a promise functions resolves some value and errors get thrown only when the promise function rejects something.

This way, async/await lets us keep our code clean, maintainable, and easy to read.

Thanks for reading. If you have thoughts on this, be sure to leave a comment.