Quick Way to work with Models and Alloy in Appcelerator Titanium

Quick Way to work with Models and Alloy in Appcelerator Titanium

For those who have taken the dive into Alloy from Appcelerator, understanding how models work can definitely simplify your overall application architecture and then you can also leverage the functionality of Backbonejs Models.

Updated version of Blog Post can be found here Quick Way to work with Models and Alloy in Appcelerator Titanium Part Two

Easily Saving the Models

When I am working and want to get something going quickly with models, I hate to create the additional files to just get access to a model so I use this simple hack below.

Here is some background information on Backbonejs Sync functionality

Configuring the Models

Then you can just create  your model or collection inline with the rest of your code and there is no need to create seperate model files. I use  this approach when I am doing some quick hacking and need to work with models

Cleaning Up the Models

But since I am using this approach to quickly test out some code, you need to find a way to clean this data up after you create it. The trick here is to understand how the models are created by looking into the properties.js sync adapter and you will see that the property name is a combination of the collection_name property and the id created for the model.

With that knowledge, we extend the collection to have a function that will delete all of the models

Then to cleanup, all we need to do is create a collection and call the cleanup method