Caching collections in backbone.js?

Question

What would be the best way to ensure that my collection stays cached and thereby only gets fetched once?

Should I implement some sort of cache layer? Should I share the

Answer 1

I ended up doing something similar to ProTom's solution. Instead of dynamically initializing a collection based on the name, I decided to just use a function to setup the collection. Through my application, I needed to initialize collections differently depending on where it was coming from. This proved to be the best way for my needs. Here's the CoffeeScript:

Cache:

cachedCollections: {}
getCollection: (key, block) ->
  collection = @cachedCollections[key]
  return collection if collection
  collection = block()
  @cachedCollections[key] = collection
  collection

Usage:

commentCollection = getCollection "comments-#{postId}", ->
  collection = new CommentCollection
  collection.url = "/api/posts/#{postId}/comments"
  collection