Common approach to fetch payload and meta data at one go in Backbone.JS?

Question

What would be an elegant or 'idiomatic' way to fetch JSON data and get a single model and a collection from it, possibly all at one go.

{
   meta:  { 
             key: value, 
             key, value    /* This would be the single model */
          }, 
    data: [
            { /* record 1 */ }, 
            { /* record 2 */ }, 
            { /* record 3 */ }, 
            { /* record 4 */ } /* And so on. This would be the collection */
          ]

}

Or is the only option I have to fetch the raw JSON and create the model manually from response.meta, and the collection from response.data?

Answer 1

You can always override the parse method, for example:

parse: function(response){
      return response['data'];
}

Ref: http://backbonejs.org/#Model-parse This will create the model using the attributes within "data".

you are invited to see a dummy example iv'e just created:

http://jsfiddle.net/5pjha/2890/