Best practice for saving an entire collection?

Question

Say that I have a Collection and I\'ve made changes to many of its Models. What\'s the best way to save all of the changes using a single HTTP request?

Answer 1

You should extend Backbone.Collection, giving it a save() method that would check each of its models hasChanged().

Then it should call Backbone.sync, which you'll probably have to extend a little into a custom sync function. If you do use a custom Backbone.sync function, then be sure to set it on your collection.

var CollectionSync = function(method, model, [options]) {
    // do similar things to Backbone.sync
}

var MyCollection = Backbone.Collection.extend({
    sync: CollectionSync,
    model: MyModel,
    getChanged: function() {
        // return a list of models that have changed by checking hasChanged()
    },
    save: function(attributes, options) {
        // do similar things as Model.save
    }
});

A different approach (using a model to represent the collection) is here: "How" to save an entire collection in Backbone.js - Backbone.sync or jQuery.ajax?

I also like https://stackoverflow.com/a/7986982/137067