Backbone collections are basically Arrays with superpowers:
They come with a bunch of enumerable functions built in, such as map, sort, and select
They have support for all sorts of events such as addition, removal, and even changes made to individual models it contains
They support reading data from a remote server
Expect to use it a lot in conjunction with models in your Backbone application.
Let's see a small code snippet to get a feeling on how it works. Here we instantiate a new collection passing an array with an initial data item for it to start:
var collection = new Backbone.Collection([
{ id: 1, name 'first' }
]);It will by default, create a new Backbone.Model for each object in that array, but it is possible to specify your own custom Model objects.
Next, we show how to add a new Model to the collection:
collection.add(new Backbone.Model({ id: 2, name: 'second' }));And finally, we can retrieve the added model by its id attribute:
var model = collection.get...