how to use Backbone.js, but in the NO-RESTful way?

Question

I'm now a front-end developer, and I have a project which is fine to use BackboneJS, and the server-side is written by others. Is there anyone who can tell me how to override delete, update, add, and so on in a not-RESTful way? The server-side's URL may be like this:

• add: www.domain.com/addBookById
• remove: www.domain.com/removeBookById

Thanks a lot!!

Answer 1

Backbone uses Backbone.sync to manage all communication with the server. There are two important things about sync for you; first of all, it looks like this:

The method signature of Backbone.sync is sync(method, model, [options])

• method – the CRUD method ("create", "read", "update", or "delete")
• model – the model to be saved (or collection to be read)
• options – success and error callbacks, and all other jQuery request options

and the second is that you can override sync on a per-model and per-collection basis. So you can add your own sync implementation to your model:

var M = Backbone.Model.extend({
    sync: function(method, model, options) {
        //...
    },
    //...
});

If you look at method you can decide which URL to use and whether you're doing a GET, POST, ... request. The model will tell you what data to send to the server. You'll want to merge options into the $.ajax options you want to use. Have a look at the standard implementation of Backbone.sync, it is pretty straight forward and should show you what you need to do: just replace the URL handling and drop some of the features you don't care about (such as emulateHTTP and emulateJSON).