Your code could return empty result because you are calling response at the time when user statuses may not yet be fetched from DB. Other problem is that if I received multiple messages from the same user, then call for his status may be duplicit. Below is a function which first fetch messages from DB avoiding duplicity of users and then get their statuses.
function getMessages(username, callback) {
// this would be "buffer" for senders of the messages
var users = {};
// variable for a number of total users I have - it would be used to determine
// the callback call because this function is doing async jobs
var usersCount = 0;
// helpers vars
var i = 0, user, item;
// get all the messages which recipient is "username"
db.view('privatemessages/all', {"key":username}, function (errA, resA) {
// for each of the message
resA.forEach(function (rowA) {
user = users[rowA.username];
// if user doesn't exists - add him to users list with current message
// else - add current message to existing user
if(!user) {
users[rowA.username] = {
// I guess this is the name of the sender
name: rowA.username,
// here will come his current status later
status: "",
// in this case I may only need content, so there is probably
// no need to insert whole message to array
messages: [rowA]
};
usersCount++;
} else {
user.messages.push(rowA);
}
});
// I should have all the senders with their messages
// and now I need to get their statuses
for(item in users) {
// assuming that user documents have keys based on their names
db.get(item, function(err, doc) {
i++;
// assign user status
users[item].status = doc.onlineStatus;
// when I finally fetched status of the last user, it's time to
// execute callback and rerutn my results
if(i === usersCount) {
callback(users);
}
});
}
});
}
...
getMessages(username, function(result) {
response.end(JSON.stringify(result));
});
Although CouchDB is a great document database you should be careful with frequent updates of existing documents because it creates entirely new document version after each update (this is because of it's MVCC model which is used to achieve high availability and data durability). Consequence of this behavior is higher disk space consumption (more data/updates, more disk space needed - example), so you should watch it and run database consumption accordingly.
