What does event.waitUntil do in service worker and why is it needed?

Jun 18 '16 Comments: 1 Answers: 1

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MDN suggests that you do the following to create and populate service worker cache:

this.addEventListener('install', function(event) {
  event.waitUntil(
    caches.open('v1').then(function(cache) {
      return cache.addAll([
        '/sw-test/',
        '/sw-test/index.html',
        ... etc ...
      ]);
    })
  );
});

I do not understand that code. The waitUntil method is documented too, and it seems the code above is…

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Comments

[Spyros Argalias]

According to the MDN docs on ExtendableEvent.waitUntil() it prevents the service worker from terminating until the work inside the function is done. This is because the work inside the function is asynchronous, it could potentially take many seconds to complete.

Essentially it just waits for the promise to be fulfilled.