Understanding the relational data model
All the examples we have gone through so far have used simple models to represent data. However, in any nontrivial application, the data structure is much more complex, and the relationships among entities are multi-relational. For any medium- or large-level application, there will be lots of one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-one relations. Keeping these relations synced with the server often becomes a tedious job, especially while saving or fetching data with multiple requests.
While researching for this book, I found that most Backbone developers, at some point of their learning phase, have faced issues with nested models and collections. Fortunately, there is a great plugin known as Backbone-relational (http://backbonerelational.org/), developed by Paul Uithol, which minimizes the Backbone model hand-holding by syncing the model and all its related models with a single save()
or fetch()
method. It provides some great features that include the...