Question

In my Backbone.js based app I am talking to my API that responds with a 204 status and an empty body, in case a collection is requested which does not contain any data yet. That’s in my opinion how a RESTful API should respond in such case.

In my app now I have the problem, that obviously no event is triggered after a 204 response was received. I tried to bind reset and all like:

  FoosCollectionView.prototype.initialize = function() {
    this.collection = new FoosCollection;
    this.collection.bind('reset', this.render, this);
    this.collection.bind('all', this.render, this);
    return this.collection.fetch();
  };

but the events never fire. So I tried to give fetch some callbacks:

  FoosCollectionView.prototype.initialize = function() {
    this.collection = new FoosCollection();
    return this.collection.fetch({
      success: function(a, b, c) {
        debugger;
      },
      error: function(a, b, c) {
        debugger;
      },
      complete: function(a, b) {
        debugger;
      }
    });
  };

Same behaviour. No debug statement is ever reached in case the response is a 204. How can I handle 204 responses then? Will I have to dig down into sync and add an extra handling for 204 there or is there something in Backbone that I simply don’t know yet?

Thx Felix

Answer 1

The solution seems pretty forward and awkward at the same time:

I simply define the parse method in my collections so that it checks, whether the passed response object is empty. That’s only the case when a 204 occured. Then inside parse I set this.collection.models = [] which triggers a reset event. The collections view is bound to that event, runs a function which can have a look inside this.collection.models. In case no models are given, a ‘no-content’ template can be rendered instead the standard template.

If someone has a better approach, I’d appreciate to here that!