Question

I’m having a hard time figuring out how best to do this. I have a model that instantiates a few collections in its initialize method. Immediately after instantiating that model, I need to get a model in one of those collections but at the time I try to get that model it seems to not be available so I end up getting ‘undefined’ instead. This is what I have:

var App = Backbone.Model.extend({
    initialize: function() {
        this.users = new Users();
    }
});
app = new App();
someUser = app.users.get("someuserID"); // -> undefined

But if I do:

var App = Backbone.Model.extend({
    initialize: function() {
        this.users = new Users();
    }
});
app = new App();
setTimeout(function(){
    someUser = app.users.get("someuserID"); // -> user instance
},3000);

I tried adding a this.trigger("loaded") to the App initialization method and then listening for that event but the event doesn’t trigger. Like so:

var App = Backbone.Model.extend({
    initialize: function() {
        this.users = new Users();
        this.trigger("loaded");
    }
});
app = new App();
app.on("trigger",function(){ // -> never actually triggers
    someUser = app.users.get("someuserID");
});

Any ideas?

Note that the Users collection IS fetching the users correctly from a restful API.

Thank you,

Luis

Answer 1

When the collection has completed the .fetch, it will fire a reset event, per the Backbone documentation. You haven’t included your Users class here, but assuming it’s just a Collection and not a wrapper for one, you’d do the following:

var App = Backbone.Model.extend({
    initialize: function() {
        this.users = new Users();
    }
});
app = new App();
app.users.on('reset',function() { var someUser = app.users.get("someuserID"); });