Execute Methods after a delay in Javascript

In rare situations you might want to call methods after some time delay. In server side code(C#.NET) you can achieve this by making thread sleep for some time. But remember in this case the overall execution of the server side code stops and resumes after the specified sleep time span is over. This results in delay in overall response time to the user.

Ever wondered how you can achieve the same thing on Client Side (in javascript). Javascript provides you a very handy built-in function “setTimeout”. Using this function you can call any method with after a specified period of time.

Let’s take one example and I will show you how to make use of this function. Assume I have one method “UpdateTotals(LocationID)” in my javascript and I want to call this method after a delay of say 4 seconds.

To accomplish this I need to call the method as shown below.

setTimeout("UpdateTotal(LocationID)", 4000);

You can try out this simple example by yourself. And for more examples you can refer this useful post.

One important thing to remember here is, this delay is asynchronous. Meaning it will only delay the execution of that particular method and it will continue with execution of other javascript code. And this is what crucial in AJAX based application where you don’t want any delay in overall execution.