Sleep function in server side script?

[ishtein]

In my server side script, I am triggering an action via an outbound ReST call. The asynchronous operation returns immediately, but provides a URL which I can poll for the operation's completion. I would like to keep the function atomic, so would like to poll the URL, and if the operation hasn't yet completed, would like to wait for a second or so and poll again, and do that for several times (I do not expect the operation to take more than 10-20 seconds, normally not more than 5 seconds) until done.

I am looking for something like setTimeout or setInterval function that I could use on the server, so that I can tell my script to wait, but can't find anything. Am I missing something? Can somebody point me to a solution for this kind of problem?

I have seen a timer activity in Workflow, which would pause the workflow for a specified period of time; it can probably serve as a workaround, but I wanted a programmatic (and programmable) solution. Will be grateful for any guidance!

[Jason Roiz]

Thank you! It works. This is not in the documentation and the link to the wiki page is no longer available.

[Jason Roiz]

Watch out! The instance becomes unusable while using gs.sleep and running the script in background script. It seems to be putting the whole instance to sleep!

[Goran WitchDoc]

There is an undocumented function gs.sleep(milliseconds) that perhaps can help you here.

[ishtein]

Göran,

As I noted in the thread with Chuck Tomasi, I have a scoped application and can't use gs.sleep(). Thanks for the advice anyway!

Any other possibilities I should consider?

[Goran WitchDoc]

I've seen this workaround, never tested it thou.. a selfmade sleep function:

1. /* time is in milliseconds - this is essentially a "sleep" function */  
2. wait: function(time){  
3.   var t1 = new GlideDateTime().getNumericValue();  
4.   var t2 = new GlideDateTime().getNumericValue();  
5.   var duration = t2 - t1;  
6.   while(duration < time){  
7.   t2 = new GlideDateTime().getNumericValue();  
8.   duration = t2 - t1;  
9.   }  
10. },  

from here: gs.sleep() in scoped application?