Sequencing animations
In this assessment you'll update a page to play a series of animations in a sequence. To do this you'll use some of the techniques we learned in the How to use Promises article.
Prerequisites: | A reasonable understanding of JavaScript fundamentals, how to use promise-based APIs. |
---|---|
Objective: | To test understanding of how to use promise-based APIs. |
Starting point
Make a local copy of the files at https://github.com/mydatarist/learning-area/tree/main/javascript/asynchronous/sequencing-animations/start . It contains four files:
- alice.svg
- index.html
- main.js
- style.css
The only file you'll need to edit is "main.js".
If you open "index.html" in a browser you'll see three images arranged diagonally:
The images are taken from our guide to Using the Web Animations API .
Note: If you get stuck, you can reach out to us in one of our communication channels .
Project brief
We want to update this page so we apply an animation to all three images, one after the other. So when the first has finished we animate the second, and when the second has finished we animate the third.
The animation is already defined in "main.js": it just rotates the image and shrinks it until it disappears.
To give you more of an idea of how we want the page to work, have a look at the finished example . Note that the animations only run once: to see them run again, reload the page.
Steps to complete
Animating the first image
We're using the Web Animations API
to animate the images, specifically the
element.animate()
method.
Update "main.js" to add a call to alice1.animate()
, like this:
const
aliceTumbling =
[
{
transform
:
"rotate(0) scale(1)"
}
,
{
transform
:
"rotate(360deg) scale(0)"
}
,
]
;
const
aliceTiming =
{
duration
:
2000
,
iterations
:
1
,
fill
:
"forwards"
,
}
;
const
alice1 =
document.
querySelector
(
"#alice1"
)
;
const
alice2 =
document.
querySelector
(
"#alice2"
)
;
const
alice3 =
document.
querySelector
(
"#alice3"
)
;
alice1.
animate
(
aliceTumbling,
aliceTiming)
;
Reload the page, and you should see the first image rotate and shrink.
Animating all the images
Next, we want to animate alice2
when alice1
has finished, and alice3
when alice2
has finished.
The animate()
method returns an
Animation
object. This object has a finished
property, which is a Promise
that is fulfilled when the animation has finished playing. So we can use this promise to know when to start the next animation.
We'd like you to try a few different ways to implement this, to reinforce different ways of using promises.
- First, implement something that works, but has the promise version of the "callback hell" problem we saw in our discussion of using callbacks .
- Next, implement it as a promise chain . Note that there are a few different ways you can write this, because of the different forms you can use for an arrow function . Try some different forms. Which is the most concise? Which do you find the most readable?
-
Finally, implement it using
async
andawait
.
Remember that element.animate()
does not
return a Promise
: it returns an Animation
object with a finished
property that is a Promise
.