How to pass two parameters to model.fetch() in backbone?

Question

How to pass two parameters to model.fetch() in backbone?

I'm making a very simple user authentication system. I'm trying to pass a combination of username and password as params to the back-end nodejs server. So this combination will be used in my db query to fetch user details.

This is what I tried on the front-end:

var user = new UserModel({id:['username', 'password']});
user.fetch();

I have defined a urlRoot property in my model that goes like this: /api/users

The back-end will handle the following url: /api/users/:id

Here since I have passed id as an array, I tried to access the 'username' by doing this req.params.id[0]. Instead it returns the first letter of the 'username'. But I want to take the entire string of username. Of course I could use the split() function to separate them but I believe there is a better way to do this.

Please tell me if my approach is wrong somewhere.

javascript
database
node.js
mongodb
backbone.js

Answer 1

That's because Backbone serializes your array to string and then encodes it as URI component.

So effectively you're sending a String 'username%2Cpassword' instead of an array.

I had the same problem and decided that sign in process doesn't really represent any "physical" resource, and most likely shouldn't be handled by user model. One doesn't CRUD users when signing in.

What i did was to create a separate model for SignIn:

SignInModel = Backbone.Model.extend({
    urlRoot: 'api/sign_in',
    defaults: {
        'username' : '',
        'password': ''
    }
});

which statically maps to api/sign_in (no id's here), and then query the database by username and password passed in the request body to the api/sign_in handler.

UserModel can then be left to handle CRUD of users.