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advanced patterns with async/await in a Node.js Express route handler returning a promise

๐Ÿ‘€ Views: 247 ๐Ÿ’ฌ Answers: 1 ๐Ÿ“… Created: 2025-06-11
node.js express async-await JavaScript

I'm maintaining legacy code that I'm having a hard time understanding I'm wondering if anyone has experience with I've been using Node.js with Express to build a simple REST API, but I'm running into an scenario where my async function seems to be resolving to `undefined`... In my route handler, I fetch data from a database using a promise-based function, and I'm trying to return the result directly. However, the response I get in Postman is just an empty object `{}` instead of the expected data. Hereโ€™s a simplified version of my code: ```javascript const express = require('express'); const app = express(); const port = 3000; const getDataFromDatabase = () => { return new Promise((resolve) => { setTimeout(() => { resolve({ id: 1, name: 'Test Item' }); }, 1000); }); }; app.get('/data', async (req, res) => { const data = await getDataFromDatabase(); return data; // This is where I expect to send the response }); app.listen(port, () => { console.log(`Server running at http://localhost:${port}`); }); ``` I initially thought that returning the `data` variable directly would work, but it seems like it's not sending the response to the client. When I check the response in Postman, it shows `{}` instead of the actual data. I've tried using `res.json(data)` to explicitly send the response and it works fine, but I don't understand why simply returning `data` doesnโ€™t send the response. Is there a special behavior in Express with async functions that Iโ€™m not aware of? Any insights would be greatly appreciated. The project is a service built with Javascript. Has anyone else encountered this? Any ideas what could be causing this? I'm working on a desktop app that needs to handle this. What am I doing wrong? I've been using Javascript for about a year now. I'd really appreciate any guidance on this. I'm working in a Windows 10 environment. What would be the recommended way to handle this?