Using HATEOAS and Backbone.js

Question

I've started experimenting with Backbone.js, and was struck by the documentation for the documentation for the url property on Backbone.Model.

In particular, I'm building out a REST API that uses HATEOAS/hypermedia to drive the client(s).

I can see the usefulness of Backbone's default behaviour of building up URLs itself for items in a collection, but for my case, would prefer to have the model URLs built out of the data that is parsed.

Has anyone extended/built on Backbone to make it do this? Maybe building upon a "standard" like HAL?

EDIT:

For clarification, let's say I have the following:

GET /orders >>

[
  {
     "_links": {
       "self": "/orders/123"
     }
     "name": "Order #123",
     "date": "2012/02/23"
  },
  {
     "_links": {
       "self": "/orders/6666"
     }
     "name": "Order #666",
     "date": "2012/03/01"
  },
]

and I have an Order model like:

var Order = Backbone.Model.extend({
});

I would like the url property to be automatically pulled out of the "self" reference in the HAL. I think creating a new base model something like (not tested):

var HalModel = Backbone.Model.extend({
  url: function() {
    return get("_links").self;
  },
});

Thoughts?

Answer 1

I've extended backbone to do exactly this, the library is available here:

https://github.com/mikekelly/backbone.hal

Answer 2

Thanks for the clarification @Pete.

I think I see what your proposing and I suppose it could work. However, in your example, you first had to know the /Orders url before you were able to get the orders. And if you reworked your json to have an id property, you'd be pretty close to the default implementation of backbone.

Now if you just want to use a generic model or base model (e.g. HALModel) and just bootstrap it with data, your approach could be useful and definitely could work. However, I would look at overriding parse to pull the url out and set it on the model:

parse: function(response) {
    this.url = response._links.self;
    delete response._links;
    return response;
}