I have a "Cancel" button on my page which should reverts all the changes I made back to the state it was loaded from server..
I guess I need to store an initial state of Backbonejs model and restore a current (changed) state back to initial.
What is the best way to achieve that?
Thank you
FWIW - i wrote a plugin to handle this automatically, specifically with the idea of "cancel" buttons in mind: http://github.com/derickbailey/backbone.memento
I dont believe there's a single method call for returning a model to its unedited state.. but the unedited values are available individually through model.previous(attribute) and collectively via model.previousAttributes.
model.previousAttributes()
returns all of the previous attributes, while model.changedAttributes()
returns all the changed attributes, but with their new values (or false
if nothing has changed). So you could combine them to write a cancelChanges
method in your prototype :
var MyModel = Backbone.Model.extend({
cancelChanges: function() {
var changed = this.changedAttributes();
if(!changed)
return;
var keys = _.keys(changed);
var prev = _.pick(model.previousAttributes(), keys);
this.set(prev, {silent: true}); // "silent" is optional; prevents change event
},
});
Here is what I came up with:
var RollbackEnabledModel = Backbone.Model.extend({
initialize: function() {
this._initAttributes = _.clone(this.attributes);
},
parse: function(data) {
this._initAttributes = _.clone(data);
return data;
},
rollback: function() {
this.set(this._initAttributes);
}
});
Take a look at NYTimes' backbone.trackit. It tracks multiple changes to the model instead of only the most recent change like model.changedAttributes()
and model.previousAttributes()
. From the README:
var model = new Backbone.Model({id:1, artist:'Samuel Beckett', 'work':'Molloy'});
model.startTracking();
model.set('work', 'Malone Dies');
console.log(model.unsavedAttributes()); // >> Object {work: "Malone Dies"}
model.set('period', 'Modernism');
console.log(model.unsavedAttributes()); // >> Object {work: "Malone Dies", period: "Modernism"}
model.save({}, {
success: function() {
console.log(model.unsavedAttributes()); // >> false
}
});
In addition, the library adds functionality to resetAttributes
to
their original state since the last save, triggers an event when the
state of unsavedChanges
is updated, and has options to opt into
prompting to confirm before routing to a new context.