jQuery deferreds and promises - .then() vs .done()

Question

I've been reading about jQuery deferreds and promises and I can't see the difference between using .then() & .done() for successful callbacks. I know Eric Hynds mentions that .done() and .success() map to the same functionality but I'm guessing so does .then() as all the callbacks are all invoked on a completion of a successful operation.

Can anyone please enlighten me to the correct usage?

Many thanks

Answer 1

The callbacks attached to done() will be fired when the deferred is resolved. The callbacks attached to fail() will be fired when the deferred is rejected.

Prior to jQuery 1.8, then() was just syntactic sugar:

promise.then( doneCallback, failCallback )
// was equivalent to
promise.done( doneCallback ).fail( failCallback )

As of 1.8, then() is an alias for pipe() and returns a new promise, see here for more information on pipe().

success() and error() are only available on the jqXHR object returned by a call to ajax(). They are simple aliases for done() and fail() respectively:

jqXHR.done === jqXHR.success
jqXHR.fail === jqXHR.error

Also, done() is not limited to a single callback and will filter out non-functions (though there is a bug with strings in version 1.8 that should be fixed in 1.8.1):

// this will add fn1 to 7 to the deferred's internal callback list
// (true, 56 and "omg" will be ignored)
promise.done( fn1, fn2, true, [ fn3, [ fn4, 56, fn5 ], "omg", fn6 ], fn7 );

Same goes for fail().

Answer 2

deferred.done()

adds handlers to be called only when Deferred is resolved. You can add multiple callbacks to be called.

var url = 'http://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1';
$.ajax(url).done(doneCallback);

function doneCallback(result) {
    console.log('Result 1 ' + result);
}

You can also write above like this,

function ajaxCall() {
    var url = 'http://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1';
    return $.ajax(url);
}

$.when(ajaxCall()).then(doneCallback, failCallback);

deferred.then()

adds handlers to be called when Deferred is resolved, rejected or still in progress.

var url = 'http://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1';
$.ajax(url).then(doneCallback, failCallback);

function doneCallback(result) {
    console.log('Result ' + result);
}

function failCallback(result) {
    console.log('Result ' + result);
}