Question

I have a UI with a form that has dropdowns andcheckboxes in order to filter the results returned from the server.

I wonder if I have to create a Model in order to keep the current settings available or just get the vals with jquery and pass them to the Collections fetch.

What would be better?

Answer 1

That dependes how much you want to invest in design, or you just can live with a more pragmatic approach.

If you run for the design solution we can say that there is not a Collection of results what we are playing with here. It is a FilterSearch model, and every time we are sending the filter params to the server what we are doing is creating an instance of FilterSearch. Let’s say:

POST http://myapp.com/filter_searchs?field1=value1&field2=value2

The server will take this request and will return the array of results. Let’s say:

{
  "field1": "value1",
  "field2": "value2",
  "results": [ "result1", "result2" ]
}

The Backbone FilterSearch model will be updated with the info responded by the server:

var myFilterSearch = App.FilterSearch.new({ field1: "value1", field2: "value2" });
myFilterSearch.save({ wait:true });

And from there we can create our results Collection:

var myResults = App.Results.new( myFilterSearch.get( "results" ) );

(All code is simplified and not tested)