You are performing an asynchronous AJAX request, which means you can't actually get back the data immediately. There are two ways to solve your issue: making it synchronous (easy but ill advised) or using a callback (a little bit more complex but generally accepted):
In your getgenres function, you could accept one more parameter: callback
plugin.getgenres = function(callback) {
/* Dont forget APIcall already took two parameters in, so callback has to be the third in line! */
APIcall("getgenres", false, callback);
}
Now modify your APIcall function to accept your callback:
var APIcall = function(api_method, api_params, callback) { ... }
And call the callback from the successful completion call - instead of having a handler method in between wrapped in a function, you can simply pass the anonymous function. So instead of success: function(data){ handle(data); }, just use:
success: callback
The anonymous function that we will pass to it will receive as its first parameter the data you were passing to the handler. Now you can do the following:
var myGenres = [];
var init = new $.lib();
init.getgenres(function(data){
/* Now your data is actually loaded and available here. */
myGenres = data;
console.log(myGenres);
});
I would like to point out that there are many better ways to handle this, including turning this into a Constructor (More here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Inheritance_and_the_prototype_chain) instead of the strange amalgamation of functions and variables you have now, as well as using JS Promises (here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Promise) to make this easier. But the basic gist should be here.
Update (potential implementation)
Because I mentioned that this could be done in a way that I think is clearer to read and use. I do not know all use cases for this, but from the provided example I would change the code to something looking like the following. Please also note I am not an expert on jQuery plugins, so I am avoiding plugging into jQuery and just using it as an easy AJAX call.
function getAjax(){
if(!window.jQuery || !window.$) throw("jQuery is required for this plugin to function.");
this.data = [];
this.request = '';
return this;
}
getAjax.prototype = {
createRequest : function(method, parameters){
this.request = {};
this.request.id = Math.floor((Math.random() * 100) + 1);
this.request.jsonrpc = '2.0';
this.request.method = method;
this.request.params = parameters || [];
return this;
},
callRequest : function(options, callback, error){
var self = this;
// We could also `throw` here as you need to set up a request before calling it.
if(!this.request) return this;
else {
$.ajax({
// We will allow passing a type and url using the options and use sensible defaults.
type: options.type || "POST",
url: options.url || "http://localhost:8898/jsonrpc",
// Here we use the request we made earlier.
data: JSON.stringify(this.request),
timeout: options.timeout || 3000,
beforeSend: function(xhr){
xhr.setRequestHeader(
'Authorization',
window.btoa( options.username + ":" + options.password)
);
},
// We will also store all the made request in this object. That could be useful later, but it's not necessary. After that, we call the callback.
success: function(data){
var store = {request:self.request, data: data};
self.data.push(store);
// Call the callback and bind `this` to it so we can use `this` to access potentially pther data. Also, pass the results as arguments.
callback(data, self.request.id).bind(self);
},
// Error function!
error: error,
dataType: options.dataType || "json"
});
}
return this;
}
}
// Example use
new getAjax().createRequest('getgenres').callRequest({
username: 'myusername',
password: 'mypassword'
}, function(data, id){
// Success! Do with your data what you want.
console.log(data);
}, function(e){
// Error!
alert('An error has occurred: ' + e.statusText);
console.log(e);
});
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.0/jquery.min.js"></script>
