Setting Backbone Marionette model via Global Object

Question

In a Backbone.Marionette application I'm building, we have an authentication which returns a user object, which we in turn stash at App.User (so it's not truly global).

The problem I'm having is that I don't want to make a call to an API endpoint to access the various properties of the returned user object. The specific use case I'm working through right now is that the returned user object contains data about which modules in the app the user is permitted to access (no worries about security, we've clarified that it's OK that the user can spoof a var in their console to gain access to the UI, the services layer will prevent their actions in such an area from being meaningful).

My goal is to avoid a scenario where every time I need access to users.appAccess (a hypothetical array that lists the modules I can access) in order to instantiate it as a model I have to call out to a URL / API endpoint by declaring it in the collection's definition like this:

    Entities.Access = Backbone.Collection.extend({
        url: 'http://example.com/users/:id/access/',
        }
    });

Removing the url property from the above code throws an error, and I can pass it a function which returns empty but this doesn't play nice with

   var access = new Entities.Access() 
   access.fetch();

when attempting to pass the fetched collection to a Marionette CollectionView. Should I simply avoid using the fetch() method and keep it otherwise a typical (albeit hack-ish) Backbone collection definition?

Chris Camaratta Chris Camaratta · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-05T04:45:20

Backbone allows you to populate a Backbone collection either as you have (with an empty constructor) or with a collection of data. It sounds like you've already got the data stored in the User object, and you want to push this information to the Entities.Access collection.

var access = new Entities.Access(user.access);

I'm with you, this feels a bit like a hack, but since Backbone doesn't support this nativly there isn't much else you can do. Have a look at Backbone-Relational or supermodel.js. These projects provide better forms of model nesting than the default implementation.

Setting Backbone Marionette model via Global Object

1 Answers