Backbone: Saving an entire collection to non-RESTful server

Question

I've been looking through multiple posts about how to save a Backbone collection using a non-RESTful server and I'm still a little confused. I've created a collection where I've overridden the toJSON method to customise my data for posting to my API ("/api/entity/735/request/personDelete" currently swapped out for jsfiddles /echo/json). So I've created a save method which uses Backbone.sync, on success I'm logging out any kind of response and the object is empty, not sure where things get lost or what I'm doing wrong; can anyone give me some guidance? Would just like to get this example working so I can use something like this going forward.

JS

var PersonCollection = Backbone.Collection.extend({
    model: PersonModel,

    url: function() {
        // Dummy JSFiddle endpoint
        // Example non-RESTful url "/api/entity/735/request/personDelete"
        return '/echo/json/';
    },

    /**
     *  Override toJSON to loop through collection models making
     *  custom objects containing specific attributes to be posted.
     */
    toJSON: function() {
        console.log(this.models);

        var plucked = this.models.map(function(model) {
            return _.pick( model.toJSON(), ["id","name", "teams"] )
        });

        console.log(plucked);
        return plucked;
    },

    save: function(options) {
      Backbone.sync('create', this, {
        success: function(data, textStatus, jqXHR) {
          console.log('Saved!', data);
        }
      });
    }
});

JSFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/kyllle/f1h4cz7f/3/

Answer 1

You don't have to force yourself to use sync if it doesn't help you. sync is there to save you time in common scenarios.

As you can see in the annotated sync code, it eventually just calls jQuery.ajax and includes logic to help with RESTful backends.

Also it triggers some events, which you might or might not listen in other parts of your app, like request (when the request was made) and sync (when the request was successfully completed), or error (if the request failed)

All of these you can do from your app, if reinventing sync isn't exciting.

Prepare your data, call $.ajax to send the data to your backend, and optionally trigger the backbone events, if you're going to listen to them.