Backbone Model and Collection url design with a NodeJS server

Question

I am new to Backbone, NodeJS and web development and am struggling with the proper design of my Backbone Collection and Model GET requests and routes on my NodeJS server.

At first I only used Models and specified the urlRoot which worked perfectly. Once I added my Models to a Collection it used the Collections' url parameter which was fine once I realized what was happening.

Say I have model "Book" and a collection "Library" defined as below:

Book

app.Book = Backbone.Model.extend({
   defaults: {
       title: 'No title',
       author: 'Unknown'
   }
});

Library

app.Library = Backbone.Collection.extend({
    model: app.Book,
    url: '/books'
});

Now if I do a GET request on the model the url will be '/books/:id which has a route specified on my node js server and I would return the book with the specified id.

My Question

I don't know what is good practice and design regarding the GET request on the Collection. Say if I want to fetch a Collection of books by a certain author my url will look something like /books/:author_id, but this would go to the same route as my Model GET request on my node js server.

How do I distinguish between the Model GET request and Collection GET request on my node server? I don't want to use a quick hack, but would like design it properly.

What is considered best practice to pass 'filter' parameters with a Collection GET request?

possible duplicate of [REST API Best practices: Where to put parameters?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4024271/rest-api-best-practices-where-to-put-parameters) — Jordan Running, Mar 05 '15 at 20:38

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 05 '15 at 20:31

0

When we need to have multiple filters like that we do something like this.

/books/:id

/books/byAuthor/:authorId

/books/bySearchTerm/:searchTerm

Although in our case we're using Angular and Repos to get our data, but the url pattern works regardless of what you're client side is structured like.

answered Mar 05 '15 at 20:31

Zipper

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So the Model will use the default `url` on the Collection, but you would then change the `url` before you do a `fetch` on the Collection? – Timo Mar 05 '15 at 20:47
That's what we did when we used Backbone. Although to be honest we found backbone difficult to use as complexity grew, and we went with a Angular system, and used normal javascript objects in a standard DDD style. – Zipper Mar 06 '15 at 02:53

Backbone Model and Collection url design with a NodeJS server

1 Answers1