Non-standard REST API in Backbone js - rest

Question

I am building Backbone.js models backed by a legacy REST API. When I create a new resource on the server, rather than return the JSON of the newly created resource, it returns plain text of the id of the newly created resource, along with a relative URL in the Location header where the resource can be gotten.
For example, I POST:
{ "firstName": "Joe", "lastName": "Blow" }
to http://fakeserver.com/people and (on success) the body of the plain/text response might be: "1234". The status of the response is 201 and the Location header would be http://fakeserver.com/people/1234. If I GET from that Location URL, it will have
{ "id": 1234, "firstName": "Joe", "lastName": "Blow" }
How would I override the sync function on my model to accommodate this convention instead of the default Backbone.js conventions?
To clarify, there is no Backbone.js version of this yet - I am trying to create a new one. The old jQuery-only way of doing it was:
$.ajax({
type: 'POST',
url: submitURL,
data: $.toJSON(person),
success: function(data, status, request) {
showSuccessMessage();
closeDialog();
},
dataType: 'json',
contentType: 'application/json'
});
The details of the showSuccessMessage and closeDialog are unimportant - just to demonstrate that basically we are just ignoring the content of the response and throwing the original object away.

Answer 1

Handle the simple text response with parse:
http://backbonejs.org/#Model-parse
parse : function(response, options){
console.log(response, options);
var data = this.toJSON(): //current model to hash
data.id = response; <- assuming that response is a simple text plain id
return data;
}
You could also use sync to overwrite something in the ajax call(that is not supported in the options hash.
http://backbonejs.org/#Model-sync