Call direct route without hash from Backbone

Question

Call direct route without hash from Backbone

I'm probably tackling this the wrong way but bear with me:

in my server.js I got this

tweetThisThing = require('./lib/kustomtwitter'),

app.get('/tweet/:msg', function(req, res){
var tweet = req.params.msg;
tweetThisThing(tweet); // le magic
    res.redirect('/cars');
});

When I direct my browser to http://localhost:3000/tweet/This will be tweeted a tweet is successfully being sent out.

When I try to invoke the same express endpoint through Backbone like so:

In my Backbone script I got this

app.navigate('tweet/' + theMessageThatWillBeTweeted,  {trigger:true, replace: true});

, Backbone always forces a hash in the route and then fails to send the tweet http://localhost:3000/#tweet/This will not be tweeted

I know this is expected behaviour and some "workarounds" involve adding pushState:true to my Backbone script, but I don't seem to be able to get it working.

Is there an easy way to get the behaviour I want or do I need to setup a backbone route for this specific usecase?

node.js
backbone.js

Answer 1

If turning on pushState with

Backbone.history.start({pushState: true});

doesn't work an alternative is to bypass Backbone all together and just use jQuery.get. For example:

$.get('tweet/' + theMessageThatWillBeTweeted, function(result) {
   // Also instead of redirecting you could output the twitter response code
   // and verify the request was a success here
   console.log(result);
});

By the way, using GET probably isn't the best way to do this. You'd probably be better off using POST which would give you much more flexibility and cleaner urls.