How to create Backbone collection from following json array?

Question

How to create Backbone collection from following json array?

I am getting a following JSON(/users.json) which contains users:

[
  [
    { "id": "43343", "project_id": "1", "username": "Amy" }
    { "id": "34244", "project_id": "1", "username": "Tommy" }
  ],
  [
    { "id": "76575", "project_id": "2", "username": "Izzy" }
    { "id": "13322", "project_id": "2", "username": "Sam" }
  ],
  { "id": "09983", "project_id": "3", "username": "Max" }
]

When project has one user I get one user hash which is not in array.

I would like to build a Backbone collection with all users. How to do that?

javascript
api
node.js
backbone.js
collections

Answer 1

You provide an array of arrays of users. So to fetch all users in the init method, you can give it data but as an array of users, i.e. you will flatten this original array of arrays once with underscore flatten method :

data = _(data).flatten(true);

Then the collection constructor will natively understand your json array.

But maybe you already do this transformation in the fetching method and this is not the problem you are facing..

Answer 2

If you have defined a collection (say userCollection) with a user model you should be able to simply do something like this:

var col;
$.getJSON("/users.json", function(data) {
    col = new userCollection(data);
});

This would more likely be done in the fetch function of the collection, but the principle here is that you can pass an array of objects to a collection and it will marshal all from json to backbone models.