How to use ko.mapping.fromJS to fill an observable

I have a view which contains a template that has a foreach to loop round an array of models. However, the array of models comes from an ajax call.

Here is an example of the scenario:

// Contained Model
function SomeModel() {
    var self = this;
    this.Firstname = ko.observable();
    this.Lastname = ko.observable();
    this.Fullname = ko.dependentObservable(function() {
        return this.Firstname + " " + this.Lastname;
    }, self);
}

// View Model
function SomeViewModel() {
    var self = this;

    this.ArrayOfModels = ko.mapping.fromJS([]);

    this.GetModelsByAjax = function() {
        $.ajax(...);
    };

    this.SuccessfullyRetrievedModelsFromAjax = function(models) {
        ko.mapping.updateFromJS(self.ArrayOfModels, models);
    };
}

ko.applyBindings(new SomeViewModel());

Here's the View:

<HtmlGuff>
    <div data-bind="template: {name: 'model-template', foreach: ArrayOfModels}"></div>
</HtmlGuff>

// Template
<HtmlGuff>
    <h2 data-bind="text: Fullname">
    <div data-bind="text: Firstname" />
    <div data-bind="text: Lastname" />
</HtmlGuff>

And this is the json result from the ajax call:

[{
    "Firstname": "Joe",
    "Lastname": "Blogs"
}, {
    "Firstname": "Foo",
    "Lastname": "Bar"
}]

Currently I am just passing in [] to the model declaration, however I keep getting the following error:

Firstname is not defined

It breaks on this: return new Function("jQuery","$item", body);.

Is there any way to do what I want to?

What you are trying to do seems fine to me.

Here is a sample with it working: http://jsfiddle.net/rniemeyer/ENMGp/ that you could maybe try to reconcile against.

I don't know exactly what your "models" look like coming back from your AJAX call though.

These lines are missing an =, but I assume that is just a typing error and would not result in the error that you listed.

<div data-bind"text: Firstname" />
<div data-bind"text: Lastname" />

I think that your best bet would be to do some logging on the models being returned by your web service and make sure that they are not nested in a way that you are not expecting.

Would be happy to continue helping, if you have more info on the result of your AJAX call or any other clues.