tim-steele / backbone-warden

Backbone Warden protects your data in Backbone Models by making the model data local and private.

Backbone Warden

Backbone Warden protects your data in Backbone Models by making the model data local and private.

Why?

We have run into issues arising from developers accessing the data in models using dot notation, through the "attributes" attribute. Backbone Warden forces users to use get/set to change or access attributes on a Model. This makes sure that any change events you have attached to your Model are fired off when someone modifies your data.

How It Works

First create a Backbone model definition, just like a normal Backbone application.

var MyModel = Backbone.Model.extend({

		// Explicitly listing what attributes to expect in this model
		defaults: {
			name: '',
			profession: ''
		},

		initialize: function () {}

	});

Then, instead of creating a new instance of your model like this:

var myNewModel = new Backbone.Model({attribute:value});

// OR

model: new MyModel({attribute:value}),

Create a new Warden, and pass the model definition as a parameter to the Warden:

var myNewModel = new Backbone.Warden(MyModel,{attribute:value});

// OR

model: new Backbone.Warden(MyModel, {attribute:value}),

The Warden will create a copy of all the methods on your model, and create a passthrough, allowing you to still using the Warden like you would a normal model. All of Backbone's normal model methods are still available, and the change events still fire. Now your data is private, and only accessible through get/set.

Warden also has the additional data() method:

// returns a copy of the data stored in the model
Warden.data();

// returns the value of the attribute from the model
Warden.data(attributeName);