backbone.js collection get vars

Question

This seems like an obvious one, but I\'m somehow missing it...

How do you send options along with a backbone.js collection fetch()?

Or, from a broader point of

Answer 1

Consider this code, where when you instantiate your collection, you pass in preferences for its offset, limit, or sorting. The initialize takes defaults if preferences are not provided. And then the url function appends these into the call to the server. Thereafter, you would have to potentially update these values (probably just the offset), when processing responses from the server.

MessageList = Backbone.Collection.extend({

    initialize: function(models, options) {
        options || (options = {});
        this.offset = options.offset || 0;
        this.limit  = options.limit || MessageList.DEFAULT_LIMIT;
        this.sortBy = options.sortBy || MessageList.DEFAULT_SORTBY; 
    },

    url: function() {
        return '/messages?' + 
               'offset=' + encodeURIComponent(this.offset) + '&' +
               'limit=' + encodeURIComponent(this.limit) + '&' + 
               'sort_by=' + encodeURIComponent(this.sortBy);
    },

    parse: function(response) {
       // Parse models
       // Parse offset, limit, sort by, etc
    }

}, {

    DEFAULT_LIMIT: 100,
    DEFAULT_SORTBY: 'name_asc'

});