Question

For a id on a model in backbone, its just id and all lower cased. What if my Id on the server is called UserId. In the parse method for backbone, how do I change UserId to id and use the same names for all other properties?

For eg.

window.User = Backbone.Model.extend({
    defaults:
       {
           UserId: 0, // <--can i just tell backbone that this is my id?
           Name: '',
           Age: 0
       }
    parse: function(response){
           var model = response;
           model.id = response.UserId;
           return model;
       }
});

Is there a better way to do this?

How about telling backbone model that my id is of type UserId.

Answer 1

Do it like so:

parse: function(response) {
  var attrs = {};
  attrs.id = response.UserId;
  return attrs;
}

Parse has the responsibility to return an attributes hash, not a model. As such, you need only transform the response into an attributes hash versus a model as you are doing.