Organize model and collection in backbone

Question

I have a JSON response with the following structure:

{
    id: 1,
    status: 0,
    created_at: "Y:m:d H:m:s",
    updated_at "Y:m:d H:m:s)",
    order_items: [items]
}

Could I make a collection with it? The ID, status etc. are just metadata. Or should I create new ItemsCollection for the items array? Also will I get notified when an item changed?

Answer 1

Yes, you're on the right track. You simply have to define three things:

1. A Model for your order object
2. A Model for the order_item object
3. A Collection for order_items

Remember that every Model is responsible for its own validation, so you need to write a validate function for it.

Then, every time you parse your JSON, in your item's parse method, you need to convert the order_items to a backbone Collection using something like:

parse: function(response) {
    if (!_.isNull(response) && !_.isNull(response.orderitems)) {
        response.orderitems = new OrderItems(response.orderitems);
    }
    return response;        
}

Once you've done this, everything should work as-intended!

Answer 2

you can do all of that, but you have to do it yourself or with a plugin. chances are, the code you end up writing will be similar to what's available in the Backbone.Relational plugin:

http://github.com/PaulUithol/Backbone-relational

i recommend using that plugin instead of rolling the code yourself