Finally, we have toArray, sortBy, and groupBy, all of which allow you to get an array of all the Models stored in a Collection. However, while toArray simply returns all the Models in the Collection, sortBy returns Models sorted by a provided criteria, and groupBy returns Models grouped into a further level of arrays. For example, if you want to get all the books in a Collection sorted alphabetically, you can use sortBy:
var books = new Backbone.Collection([
{title: "Zebras Are Cool"},
{title: "Alligators Are Also Cool"},
{title: "Aardvarks!!"}
]);
var notAlphabeticalBooks = books.toArray();
notAlphabeticalBooks;// will contain Zebras, then Alligators, then Aardvarks
var alphabeticalBooks = books.sortBy('title');
alphabeticalBooks;// will contain Alligators, then Aardvarks, then ZebrasIf, instead, you want to organize them into groups based on the first letter of their title, you can use groupBy, as follows:
var firstLetterGroupedBooks = books.groupBy(function...