Question

I am building a system that will pull 2 variables from the url (variable1.domain.com/variable2).

I cannot find any documentation showing how to do anything with subdomains in backbone. Default_url is just passed as domain.com/api. I did find something called CORS (www.enable-cors.org) that enables cross domain calls, but it says nothing about dynamic domains.

Is something like this even possible with backbone? If not, does anyone know if ember.js or other backbone-like systems have this “feature”?

Answer 1

This is certainly possible but not within the scope of Backbone’s default behavior. Assuming that all your subdomains utilize the same router code, you could hack up a solution that might look like this:

var Router = Backbone.Router.extend({
  routes: {
    '*variables': 'buildRoute'
  },

  subdomain: function() {
    // This is probably not the prettiest/best way to get the subdomain
    return window.location.hostname.split('.')[0];
  },

  buildRoute: function(variables) {
    // `variables` are all your hash variables
    // e.g., in the URL http://variable1.domain.com/#variable3=apples&variable4=oranges
    // `variables` here would be the string 'variable3=apples&variable4=oranges'
    // so you would have to parse that string into a JSON representation, but that's trivial
    // Once you have the JSON, you can do something like:
    myView.render(this.subdomain(), variablesJSON);
    // Your view's `render` function then has the subdomain and all the variables from the URL,
    // so it can use them appropriately.
  }
});

One important caveat with this approach: it works fine for users navigating to URLs themselves, but will quickly become wonky when your application needs to perform a navigate call to the Router. Backbone will navigate only to hash portion of the URL, so it will not include subdomain. You would probably have to spin up a custom navigation function that sets window.location before doing anything else.

Obviously this is probably not something Backbone is well-suited for. I’m unsure if Ember or anything else has this functionality, but I would doubt it. Subdomains are meant to be distinct areas of your site, so you might not be using them correctly.