Backbone.ScopedCollection

An experiment in adding scopes to Backbone.Collection.

var ScopedCollection = Backbone.Collection.extend(Backbone.ScopedCollection);

var posts = ScopedCollection.extend({
  scopes: {
    published: function() {
      return this.where({ published: true });
    }
  }
});

posts.scoped().published().result(); // returns a collection containing only published posts

Why?

It makes your collection functions chainable. I like the chainable Underscore functions that are available to Backbone collections, but they mostly return arrays of models, so any extra collection functions you may write can't be chained.

In some cases, it would be nice to set up scopes on a collection to do something like the following:

posts.scoped().inCategory('personal').byAuthor(author).published().result();

What is a scope?

A function added to the scopes object literal when you extend Backbone.Collection. The function will be executed in the context of the collection (meaning: this inside the function body refers to the collection). It returns an array of models. You'll probably want to use Backbone.Collection methods like where and filter to do the work.

Isn't the scoped() and result() thing a bit messy looking?

Yeah, maybe. It's a similar approach to using chain() and value() with Underscore. The scoped function returns a wrapped object (an instance of Backbone.CollectionScope), and a wrapped object is returned by every chained scope until result finally returns a modified collection. It's inspired by ActiveRecord::Relation from Rails. I haven't found a cleaner way without introducing confusion and ambiguity. If you have any ideas, I'd love to chat about it.