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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-04T06:13:34+00:00

I’m trying to get the backbone-relational plugin working with an association between tasks and

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I’m trying to get the backbone-relational plugin working with an association between tasks and messages. (A task has many messages).

The information is pulled from a standard rails/activerecord site, which has a task_id field as the foreign key.

The problem is, backbone-relational won’t populate the ‘messages’ field with any messages on teh Task model unless I set the key as “task_id” in the reverse relation…but that means that, when accessing the task from the Message model, the task_id field is populated with the actual task object, not the ‘task_id’ integer, which is overwritten.

I’m guessing there’s a simple way to specify task_id as the foreign key with which to determine the parent task, yet have the object that key represents placed in a different field (eg ‘task’ on the messages object)…but I can’t figure out how. Any ideas appreciated. Code below

class Backbonescaffolddemo.Models.Task extends Backbone.RelationalModel
  paramRoot: 'task'

  relations: [{
    type: Backbone.HasMany,
    key: "messages",
    relatedModel: "Backbonescaffolddemo.Models.Message",
    collectionType: "Backbonescaffolddemo.Collections.MessagesCollection",
    includeInJSON: true
    reverseRelation: {
      key: "task_id"
      includeInJSON: true
    }
  }]
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You may be able to use keySource or keyDestination to address your particular problem.

    Example

    In the following example, suppose we are getting data from an old-school relational database, where there is a one-to-many relationship between Monster and Loot_Item. This relationship is expressed by a Monster_Id foreign key in the Loot_Item table. Let us also suppose that our REST service doesn’t do any fancy-pants data nesting for us, since that seems to match the situation in your question fairly closely.

    keySource

    Now, let’s set set "keySource" to my foreign key ("Monster_Id") and "key" to the name of the attribute where I want the actual data to go (say, "Monster"). If you break in the debugger, you will see in the attributes object that there is, in fact, a field called "Monster", and that it does point to the monster model data. Hey, cool!

    includeInJSON

    However, if you toJSON that puppy, guess what? It has put all the monster data in Monster_Id, just like you didn’t want! GAH! We can fix that by setting "includeInJSON" to "Monster_Id". Now, when it is converted to JSON, it puts the proper ID back into the Monster_Id field, when it is serializing your data to JSON, to send up to the server.

    Problem solved? Er, well, actually, not necessarily…

    CAVEAT: This all sounds super-useful, but there’s one fairly glaring problem that I have found with this scenario. If you are using a templating engine (such as the one in Underscore.js) that requires you to convert your model to JSON, before passing it into the template, whoops — you don’t have access to your relational data. Alas, the JSON that we want for our messages is not necessarily the same JSON that we want to feed into our templates.

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