Question

I have a backbone collection and I want to create a method that populates the collection. What I found is the push method but this require to iterate over all the items:

define([
    ...
], function($, _, Backbone, imagesCollection, imageTemplate, gridView) {
    var AppView = Backbone.View.extend({
        el: '#container',
        template: _.template( imageTemplate ),
        events: {
            'click #search': 'search'
        },
        initialize: function() {
            this.input = this.$('#search-term');
        },
        populate: function(data) {
                for (var i=0;i<data.length;i++) {
                    imagesCollection.push(data[i]);
                }
                //IS THERE ANY WAY TO PREVENT ITERATING OVER ALL THE ITEMS?
        },
        search: function() {
            $.ajax({
                type: 'get',
                url: myurl,
                dataType:'jsonp',
                success: function(response){
                    populate(response);
                }
            });
        }
    });

    return AppView;
});

Is there any other solution?
I am new to backbone so if you see anything wrong – please tell me.

Answer 1

There are at least two ways to populate a backbone collection without iterating in my own code.

method add (which appends models you passed in)

populate: function(data) {
    imagesCollection.add(data); // old models will be preserved
}

method reset (which replaces all models in the collection by the new ones you provide)

populate: function(data) {
    imagesCollection.reset(data); // new models will erase the old ones
}

See http://backbonejs.org/#Collection-reset and http://backbonejs.org/#Collection-add