Question

So when I save a model on the backend, My api send back a response telling everything went fine and giving you some other pointers in json format

My problem is that backbone think I want to use that response as attributes of my model and automatically dump them in the model attributes..

I just saved it on the front-end and do not want to save the attributs again.

Answer 1

That is the what Backbone.Model.parse is for. By default, it is just a pass-through, so you don’t need to call “super”.

Let’s say you only care about two properties that come back (id and foo) and you don’t care about anything else:

var myModel = Backbone.Model.extend({

    parse : function(resp, xhr) {
        return {
            id:  resp.id,
            foo: resp.foo
        };
    }

});

Note that I included “id” in my example. It is really important that creates (POST) return an id property. Without it, the Backbone model won’t know how to update/delete in the future. Even if it has a different name for id (like “objectId”), you should still set the id in this function.