Backbone Symbolic Links

Lets take a common browser data pattern. Your database stores documents with IDs pointing to other documents in the database and unfortunately the database does not have a concept of joins. You want the database to continue storing IDs, but on the JavaScript side, you want to stop manually translating each ID into a Backbone model.

This is where the Backbone Symlink library comes in. This gives Backbone models a few methods for tethering IDs to other models in other collections. Calls to .get() and .set() return the value as a model, but .toJSON() will return a string ID in its place. This allows Backbone models to play nice with relational data and keep your database clean.

Install

Download the latest version from our release page and use via a script tag. This library depends on both Backbone and Underscore, so just make sure they are included before Backbone Symlink. This library does not declare any variables and instead adds the needed methods directly to the available Backbone object.

In browsers:

<script type="text/javascript" src="underscore.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="backbone.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="backbone-symlink.js"></script>

With Node.js, include Backbone and Underscore in the package.json under dependencies and then use Backbone with one require:

var Backbone = require("backbone-symlink");