Invertebrate

creates a simple object clone of a Backbone.Model or Backbone.Collection

Why

Our main use case is with the Flux architecture for React apps, which emphasizes immutable data in the views. In our stores we use Backbone to talk to the API and mutate data, and then pass along immutable clones to the view.

We're using Facebook's immutable library for this reason.

If you just want regular js objects, you can just call .toJS() on the result.

Usage

Given this domain.

    var Book = Backbone.Model.extend({
      invertebrateProperties: ['age'],
      age: function() {
        return currentYear - this.get('copyrightYear');
      }
    });
    
    var BookCollection = Backbone.Collection.extend({
      model: Book
    });
    

And this instantiated data:

    collection = new BookCollection([
          {
            title: 'Vampires in the Lemon Grove',
            publisher: 'Random House',
            copyrightYear: 2013
          },
          {
            title: 'St. Lucy\'s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves',
            publisher: 'Vintage',
            copyrightYear: 2007
          }
   ]);

You can use this:

var invertebrate = require('invertebrate');
var clone = invertebrate(collection);

Clone will be something like this:

[
          {
            title: 'Vampires in the Lemon Grove',
            publisher: 'Random House',
            copyrightYear: 2013,
            age: 2
          },
          {
            title: 'St. Lucy\'s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves',
            publisher: 'Vintage',
            copyrightYear: 2007,
            age: 8
          }
]

No functions, not listeners, just the plain attributes.

This also plays nicely with the backbone-associations plugin. It will recursively invertebratize your relations.

Camelcase and Rails

By default, Rails apps tend to produce snake_cased javascript attributes. This library converts them to camelcase by default. If you don't want this behavior, use this:

var clone = invertebrate(model, { camelize: false });