Type Conversion

You often want to convert from what the model sends you to a form more useful to JavaScript. For example, contacts might be returned from the server with dates that look like: "1982-10-20". We can model to convert it to something closer to new Date(1982,10,20). We can do this in two ways:

Way 1: Setters

The attrs and attr function look for a setATTRNAME function to handle setting the date property.

By providing a function that takes the raw data and returns a form useful for JavaScript, we can make our models (which use attrs and attr) automatically convert server data.

The following demo shows converting a contact's birthday into a string.

Way 2: Convert

If you have a lot of dates, Setters won't scale well. Instead, you can set the type of an attribute and provide a function to convert that type.

The following sets the birthday attribute to "date" and provides a date conversion function:

$.Model.extend("Contact",
{
  attributes : { 
    birthday : 'date'
  },
  convert : {
    date : function(raw){
      if(typeof raw == 'string'){
        var matches = raw.match(/(\d+)-(\d+)-(\d+)/)
        return new Date( matches[1], 
                        (+matches[2])-1, 
                         matches[3] )
      }else if(raw instanceof Date){
        return raw;
      }
    }
  },
  findAll : function( ... ){ ... }
},
{
  // No prototype properties necessary
})