Question

I was curious if there was a way for me to set a collections model to a parent model. I may be way off here as I’ve just started with backbone.js but heres the structure I’m looking to do.

Collection  
  model:object

the object model is the parent model of two other sub-objects.

Object  
  ->Image  
  ->text  

The two sub models extend the Object model.

Is this do-able? I hope I am making myself clear here. Thanks to anyone who can offer any assistance.

Answer 1

Yes, this is doable.

I haven’t used different subclasses in a collection myself, but here is a quite nice article about Backbone inheritance in general as well as “Subclasses in a Super Collection” in particular.

After setting up the inheritance itself the author uses the collections parse function to create corresponding models.

Backbone.Collection.extend({
    model: Location,
    parse: function (res) {
        _.each(res, function (location) {
            switch(location.phase) {
               case 'solid':
                  this.add(new Country(location));
               case 'liquid':
                  this.add(new Ocean(location));
               //...
            }
        }, 
        this);
     }
});

Regarding the inheritance part you might also wanna take a look at this question and JohnnyO’s answer which might help your code design and avoid calls like

this.constructor.__super__.initialize.apply(this, arguments);