Question

I have exposed to Backbone an API that returns user profiles with this structure:
{id: 1, following: {…}}. I only want to use the dictionary inside of the “following” attribute. How would I do that? Right now, I have a model with a URL to the API. I have a collection that uses this model. I do a fetch() on the collection, but I only want to use the dictionary inside of “following”.

Answer 1

You should use parse to extract what you want from the the response:

parse model.parse(response)

parse is called whenever a model’s data is returned by the server, in fetch, and save. The function is passed the raw response object, and should return the attributes hash to be set on the model.

So you’d want something like this in your model:

parse: function(response) {
    return response.following;
}