Daisy-chaining remote object calls

Question

If you want to get data from a series of CFCs using remote
object, and each call depends on data received from the previous
call, you have to daisy-chain the functions making the calls,
otherwise there is no way to guarantee that the data is available
in time (in practice it is never available in time) because the
main thread races on regardless.
Now if you want to refresh parts of the data, or you want to
get a different set of data from one or more of the same CFCs, you
either can use the same functions and set up a different set of
daisy-chains with multiple boolean tests to see which chain of
links should be being followed ( and this ends up something akin to
a four-dimensional Hampton Court maze), or you have to duplicate
the remote calls over and over again in different sets of functions
and resultHandlers. Either way you end up with a horrible mess.
Is there any way to write a class that can suspend the main
thread, pending a remote call listener sending a resume main thread
event.
The other way that would work (though this would not be as
good) is to change addEventListener, so that you can pass arguments
into the resultHandler.
Does anyone have any ideas that could lead to a solution to
this problem? It's giving me gray hair.
Doug

Answer 1

"suspend the main thread, pending a remote call.." No. Can't
be done.
..."pass arguments into the resultHandler..." Yes, this is
done using the AsyncToken. (ACT pattern)
The send() methods returns an AsyncToken object. You can use
this dynamic object to add almost anything you want to the token,
including strings, and functions (google the term "closure").
As I am still not comfortable with anonymous functions, I
like to pass strings. I pass an identifier, which I can use in a
switch statement to determine the next step. Sometimes I pass a
"nextStep" string to define finer grain conditionality.
I use a single dataService object and result handler function
for all calls.
Tracy