Better solution for nested Backbone.js collections

Question

Many of my Backbone models often deal with nested models and collections, so far I\'m using a combination of defaults, parse and toJSON ma

Answer 1

Faced with the same problem, I do something like that (the code below is output of TypeScript compiler so it's a bit verbose):

  var Model = (function (_super) {
    __extends(Model, _super);
    function Model() {
        _super.apply(this, arguments);
    }
    Model.prototype.fieldToType = function () {
        return {};
    };

    Model.prototype.parse = function (response, options) {
        _.each(this.fieldToType(), function (type, field) {
            if (response[field]) {
                if (_.isArray(response[field])) {
                    response[field] = _.map(response[field], function (value) {
                        return new type(value, { parse: true });
                    });
                } else {
                    response[field] = new type(response[field], { parse: true });
                }
            }
        });
        return _super.prototype.parse.call(this, response, options);
    };
    Model.prototype.toJSON = function () {
        var j = _super.prototype.toJSON.call(this);
        _.each(this.fieldToType(), function (type, field) {
            if (j[field]) {
                if (_.isArray(j[field])) {
                    j[field] = _.map(j[field], function (value) {
                        return value.toJSON();
                    });
                } else {
                    j[field] = j[field].toJSON();
                }
            }
        });
        return j;
    };
    return Model;
})(Backbone.Model);

And then I can simply override the fieldToType method to define types of my fields:

PendingAssignmentOffer.prototype.fieldToType = function () {
    return {
        'creator': User,
        'task_templates': TaskTemplateModel,
        'users': User,
        'school_classes': SchoolClass
    };
};